Welcome to the FreeBSD Documentation Project. Good quality documentation is very important to the success of FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD Documentation Project (FDP) is how a lot of that documentation is produced. Your contributions are very valuable. This document's main purpose is to clearly explain how the FDP is organized, how to write and submit documentation to the FDP, and how to effectively use the tools available to you when writing documentation. Membership Everyone is welcome to join the FDP. There is no minimum membership requirement, no quota of documentation you need to produce per month. All you need to do is subscribe to the &a.doc;. After you have finished reading this document you should: Know which documentation is maintained by the FDP. Be able to read and understand the XML source code for the documentation maintained by the FDP. Be able to make changes to the documentation. Be able to submit your changes back for review and eventual inclusion in the FreeBSD documentation. The FDP is responsible for four categories of FreeBSD documentation. Manual pages The English language system manual pages are not written by the FDP, as they are part of the base system. However, the FDP can (and has) re-worded parts of existing manual pages to make them clearer, or to correct inaccuracies. The translation teams are responsible for translating the system manual pages into different languages. These translations are kept within the FDP. FAQ The FAQ aims to address (in short question and answer format) questions that are asked, or should be asked, on the various mailing lists and newsgroups devoted to FreeBSD. The format does not permit long and comprehensive answers. Handbook The Handbook aims to be the comprehensive on-line resource and reference for FreeBSD users. Web site This is the main FreeBSD presence on the World Wide Web, visible at http://www.FreeBSD.org/ and many mirrors around the world. The web site is many people's first exposure to FreeBSD. The documentation for the web site, &os; Handbook, and FAQ are available in the doc/ Subversion repository, which is located at svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/. Manual pages are available in the src/ Subversion repository, which is available at svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/. This means that the logs of changes to these files are visible to anyone, and anyone can use svn to view the changes. In addition, many people have written tutorials or other web sites relating to FreeBSD. Some of these are stored in the Subversion repository as well (where the author has agreed to this). In other cases the author has decided to keep his documentation separate from the main FreeBSD repository. The FDP endeavors to provide links to as much of this documentation as possible. This document assumes that you already know: How to maintain an up-to-date local copy of the FreeBSD documentation by maintaining a local copy of the FreeBSD Subversion repository using svn. How to download and install new software using either the FreeBSD Ports system or &man.pkg.add.1;. 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. &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/textproc/docproj &prompt.root; make JADETEX=no install Get a local copy of the FreeBSD doc tree using svn. If network bandwidth or local drive space is a concern, then at minimum, the head/share and head/language/share directories will need to be checked out. For example: &prompt.user; mkdir -p head/share &prompt.user; mkdir -p head/en_US.ISO8859-1/share &prompt.user; svn checkout svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head/share head/share &prompt.user; svn checkout svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head/en_US.ISO8859-1/share head/en_US.ISO8859-1/share If you have plenty of disk space then you could check out everything. &prompt.user; svn checkout svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head head 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. &prompt.user; svn checkout svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head/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. &prompt.user; cd head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles &prompt.user; svn export committers-guide vpn-w2k If you wanted to edit an existing document, such as the FAQ, which is in head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq you would check it out of the repository like this. &prompt.user; svn checkout svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq Edit the .xml 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. &prompt.user; 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 head/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: &prompt.user; make FORMATS=html But when you want to convert the document to both html and txt format, you could use either two separate &man.make.1; runs, with: &prompt.user; make FORMATS=html &prompt.user; make FORMATS=txt or, you can do it in one command: &prompt.user; make FORMATS="html txt" Submit your changes using &man.send-pr.1;.