Chapter 16. Viewing Your Changes

There are several stylesheets available for generating viewable documentation, the most useful will probably be:

There are also XSL stylesheets available, that are equivalents to the above DSSSL sheets. The list includes: html_xsl, bightml_xsl, phpweb_xsl, howto_xsl, chm_xsl and fo (produces a FO file, that can be later transformed to PDF using a FO processor, like Apache FOP)

To generate a viewable copy of the documentation, cd to the phpdoc directory and issue one of the following commands:

$ make html
$ make bightml
$ make phpweb

To make an actual copy of this HOWTO:

$ make howto
 -or-
$ make howto_xsl

The plain text version of the PHP documentation is made by filtering the bightml output through lynx.

Note: Generating viewable documentation is CPU intensive and can take a little while to complete. E.g. generating the simple HTML manual takes about 1 hour on a normal computer.

Where the output files are placed depends on the format you built. HTML manuals generate in the html subdirectory of phpdoc, similarly the make phpweb command will place the files in the php directory. The place for the HOWTO HTML files is howto/html.

If all goes well, you should have your own copy of the documentation, including any changes you've made.

Tip: Instead of generating the whole manual (which takes too much time), you can generate just a single section, by issuing the following command: xsltproc --stringparam rootid "<ID>" xsl/html.xsl manual.xml (replacing <ID> by the ID of the file/section you want to build.