Chapter 2. Tools

Table of Contents
2.1. Required Tools
2.2. Optional Tools

Several software tools are used to manage the FreeBSD documentation and render it to different output formats. Some of these tools are required and must be installed before working through the examples in the following chapters. Some are optional, adding capabilities or making the job of creating documentation less demanding.

2.1. Required Tools

Install textproc/docproj from the Ports Collection. This meta-port installs all the applications required to do useful work with the FreeBSD documentation. Some further notes on particular components are given below.

2.1.1. DTDs and Entities

FreeBSD documentation uses several Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and sets of XML entities. These are all installed by the textproc/docproj port.

XHTML DTD (textproc/xhtml)

XHTML is the markup language of choice for the World Wide Web, and is used throughout the FreeBSD web site.

DocBook DTD (textproc/docbook-xml-450)

DocBook is designed for marking up technical documentation. Most of the FreeBSD documentation is written in DocBook.

ISO 8879 entities (textproc/iso8879)

Character entities from the ISO 8879:1986 standard used by many DTDs. Includes named mathematical symbols, additional characters in the Latin character set (accents, diacriticals, and so on), and Greek symbols.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

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