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2. Installation

2.1 Where to get the source archive

You can get the source archive of the linuxdoc-tools from:

The name of the archive may be linuxdoc-tools_x.y.z.tar.gz or linuxdoc-tools_x.y.z-rel.tar.gz or linuxdoc-tools_x.y.z.orig.tar.gz. These have the equivalent contents. You can use anyone.

2.2 What LinuxDoc-Tools Needs

LinuxDoc-Tools depends on the usage of sgml parser from Jade or OpenJade (nsgmls or onsgmls). You have to install either of them to use this.

The source archive of the linuxdoc-tools contains the tools and data that you need to write SGML documents and convert them to groff, LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, GNU info, LyX, and RTF. In addition to this package, you will need some additional tools for generating formatted output.

  1. groff. You need version 1.08 or greater. You can get this from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu. There is a Linux binary version at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text as well. You will need groff to produce plain text from your SGML documents. nroff will not work! You can find the version of your groff from groff -v < /dev/null.
  2. TeX and LaTeX. This is available more or less everywhere; you should have no problem getting it and installing it (there is a Linux binary distribution on sunsite.unc.edu). Of course, you only need TeX/LaTeX if you want to format your SGML documents with LaTeX. So, installing TeX/LaTeX is optional. If you need PDF output, then you need pdfLaTeX also.
  3. flex. lex will probably not work. You can get flex from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu.
  4. gawk and the GNU info tools, for formatting and viewing info files. These are also available on ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu, or on ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text (for gawk) and ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Manual-pagers (for GNU info tools). awk will not work.
  5. LyX (a quasi-WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX, with SGML layouts), is available on ftp://ftp.via.ecp.fr.

2.3 Installing The Software

The steps needed to install and configure the LinuxDoc-Tools are:

  1. First, unpack the tar file of the source archive somewhere. This will create the directory linuxdoc-tools-x.y.z. It doesn't matter where you unpack this file; just don't move things around within the extracted source tree.
  2. Read the INSTALL file - it has detailed installation instructions. Follow them. If all went well, you should be ready to use the system immediately once you have done so.

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