Documentation as books

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 6:39 AM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> In the past somebody somehow seems to have converted our official
> documentation to books.
>
> Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Desktop Guide
> http://books.google.se/books?id=vJ_03jX2ZRQC
>
> Ubuntu 11.04 Server Guide
> http://books.google.se/books?id=gpbk66Y_s5sC
>
> Anybody who can tell anything about how it was done?

Confirmed by looking back at the archive, 11.04 was the last release
that the team used DocBook for both Desktop and Server guides, meaning
outputting a PDF of the Desktop guide was a pretty standard and
trivial thing with DocBook (as Doug points out, we still do it for the
Server Guide). During the Oneric (11.10) cycle the team switched over
to Mallard.

A quick search tells me that Mallard can output to .epub, which then
you could convert to .pdf but I have no idea how that would turn out.
I started digging into the html/Makefile to tease out what I'd need to
do to generate an epub with yelp-build but style cleanup we have in
that Makefile started to make me a bit scared to attempt it on a night
I want to sleep :)

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com