What can I use to create html page-per-chapter/monolithic-page/pdf reference manual?

Question

Howdy,

I want to write a reference manual for a project, and I want to make it available both online as a HTML one-page-per-chapter manual (optionally single-monolithic-page would be nice as well) and as PDF version.

Prime examples:

• The Gentoo Handbook (html one page per chapter, html monolithic)
• Netty's user guide (html one page per chapter, html monolithic, pdf)
• Spring's reference docs (html, pdf)

What can I use to achieve this?

Answer 1

HTMLDOC.

HTMLDOC takes one- or multi-file HTML input and converts the input into PostScript, PDF or indexed HTML. Unless you require full CSS support, this is a good tool for the type job you want get done. You'd...

• ...author, maintain and version-control your documentation chapter-wise in HTML and
• ...then convert to PDF or indexed HTML as needed with the help of HTMLDOC.

AFAIK, the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) generates its PDFs that way.

(I'm sure you've already investigated how netty.pdf and spring-reference.pdf were generated (jDocBook plugin for Maven and FOP/apache), so I won't add any details about these.

Answer 2

It's docbook + maven plugins (maven-jdocbook-plugin).

This pom contains a sample on how to produce what I intended in the first place.

The results can be found here.

There's also an alternative (still using docbook and maven), docbkx-tools.