If you just want to get going, and feel confident you can pick things up as you go along, follow these instructions.
Install the textproc/docproj meta-port.
# cd /usr/ports/textproc/docproj # make JADETEX=no install
Get a local copy of the FreeBSD doc tree. Either use CVSup in checkout mode to do this, or get a full copy of the CVS repository locally.
If you have the CVS repository locally then as a minimum you will need to checkout the doc/share, and doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/share directories.
% cvs checkout doc/share % cvs checkout doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/share
If you have plenty of disk space then you could check out everything.
% cvs checkout doc
If you are preparing a change to an existing book or article, check it out of the repository as necessary. If you are planning on contributing a new book or article then use an existing one as a guide.
For example, if you want to contribute a new article about setting up a VPN between FreeBSD and Windows 2000 you might do the following.
Check out the articles directory.
% cvs checkout doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles
Copy an existing article to use as a template. In this case, you have decided that your new article belongs in a directory called vpn-w2k.
% cd doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles % cp -R committers-guide vpn-w2k
If you wanted to edit an existing document, such as the FAQ, which is in doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq you would check it out of the repository like this.
% cvs checkout doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq
Edit the .sgml files using your editor of choice.
Test the markup using the lint target. This will quickly find any errors in the document without actually performing the time-consuming transformation.
% make lint
When you are ready to actually build the document, you may specify a single format or
a list of formats in the FORMATS variable. Currently, html, html-split, txt, ps, pdf, and
rtf are supported. The most up to date list of supported formats
is listed at the top of the doc/share/mk/doc.docbook.mk file.
Make sure to use quotes around the list of formats when you build more than one format
with a single command.
For example, to convert the document to html only, you would use:
% make FORMATS=html
But when you want to convert the document to both html and txt format, you could use either two separate make(1) runs, with:
% make FORMATS=html % make FORMATS=txt
or, you can do it in one command:
% make FORMATS="html txt"
Submit your changes using send-pr(1).