...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
To use the Boost documentation tools, you will need several tools:
xsltproc:
libxslt
package.doxygen:
Available from http://www.doxygen.orgBoostBook provides a nearly-automatic setup script. Once you have downloaded and installed xsltproc, doxygen, and (optionally) java, the setup script can download the required DocBook stylesheets, DocBook DTD, and (when Java is enabled) Apache FOP for PDF output. It will then configure Boost.Build version 2 to build BoostBook documentation. To perform the installation, execute the script tools/boostbook/setup_boostbook.sh from a directory where you would like the resulting XSL, DTD, and Apache FOP installations to occur.
This section describes how to manually configure Boost
Boost version 2 (BBv@) for BoostBook. If you can use the
automatic setup script, you should. All configuration will
happen in the BBv2 user configuration file,
user-config.jam
. If you do not have a copy
of this file in your home directory, you should copy the one
that resides in tools/build/v2
to your home
directory. Alternatively, you can edit
tools/build/v2/user-config.jam
directly or
a site-wide site-config.jam
file.
To configure xsltproc manually, you
will need to add a directive to
user-config.jam
telling it where to find
xsltproc. If the program is in your path,
just add the following line to
user-config.jam
:
using xsltproc ;
If xsltproc is somewhere else, use
this directive, where XSLTPROC
is the full
pathname to xsltproc (including
xsltproc):
using xsltproc : XSLTPROC ;
This section describes how to configure Boost.Build to use local copies of the DocBook DTD and XSL stylesheets to improve processing time. You will first need to download two packages:
Norman Walsh's DocBook XSL stylesheets,
available at the DocBook sourceforge
site. Extract the DocBook XSL stylesheets to a
directory on your hard disk (which we'll refer to as the
DOCBOOK_XSL_DIR
).
The DocBook DTD, available as a ZIP archive
at the OASIS
DocBook site. The package is called "DocBook XML
4.2". Extract the DocBook DTD to a directory on your hard
disk (which we'll refer to as the
DOCBOOK_DTD_DIR
). You will want to extract this
archive in a subdirectory!
Add the following directive telling BBv2 where to find the DocBook DTD and XSL stylesheets:
# BoostBook configuration using boostbook : DOCBOOK_XSL_DIR : DOCBOOK_DTD_DIR ;
Whenever you change this directive, you will need to
remove the bin.v2
directory that BBv2 generates.
This is due to longstanding bug we are trying to fix.
At this point, you should be able to build HTML
documentation for libraries that do not require Doxygen. To
test this, change into the directory $BOOST_ROOT/libs/function/doc
and
run the command bjam --v2
: it should produce HTML
documentation for the Boost.Function library in the
html
subdirectory.
Doxygen is required to build the documentation for
several Boost libraries. You will need a recent version of
Doxygen (most of
the 1.3.x and 1.4.x versions will suffice). BBv2 by adding the
following directive to
user-config.jam
:
using doxygen : DOXYGEN ;
DOXYGEN
should be replaced with the
name of the doxygen executable (with full
path name). If the right doxygen executable
can be found via the path, this parameter can be
omitted, e.g.
using doxygen ;
![]() |
Important |
---|---|
The relative order of declarations in
|
In order to generate PDF and PostScript output using
Apache FOP, you will need a Java interpreter and Apache FOP
(version 0.20.5 is best). Unpack Apache FOP to some
directory. The top level directory of the FOP tool should
contain a main script called fop.sh
on Unix
and fop.bat
on Windows. You need to specify
the location of that script and Java location to
Boost.Build. Add the following to your
user-config.jam
or
site-config.jam
:
using fop : FOP_COMMAND : JAVA_HOME ;
replacing
FOP_COMMAND
with the full path to the FOP main script, and
replacing JAVA_HOME
with the directory where Java is
installed. If the JAVA_HOME
environment variable is
already set, you don't need to specify it above.
Proper generation of images in PDFs depends on the Jimi Image
Library. To get FOP to use Jimi, extract the
JimiProClasses.zip
file from the Jimi SDK
and rename it—if on Windows, to
jimi-1.0.jar
, or if on *nix, to
JimiProClasses.jar
—and place it in the
lib/
subdirectory of your FOP
installation.
To test PDF generation, switch to the directory $BOOST_ROOT/libs/function/doc
and
execute the command bjam --v2 pdf. In the
absence of any errors, Apache FOP will be executed to transform
the XSL:FO output of DocBook into a PDF file.
Once BoostBook has been configured, we can build some
documentation. First, change to the directory
$BOOST_ROOT/doc
and remove (or make writable) the
.html
files in
$BOOST_ROOT/doc/html
. Then, run bjam
--v2
to build HTML documentation. You should see several
warnings like these while DocBook documentation is being built
from BoostBook documentation:
Cannot find function named 'checked_delete' Cannot find function named 'checked_array_delete' Cannot find function named 'next'
These warnings are emitted when the Boost documentation
tools cannot find documentation for functions, methods, or classes
that are referenced in the source, and are not harmful in any
way. Once Boost.Jam has completed its execution, HTML
documentation for Boost will be available in
$BOOST_ROOT/doc/html
. You can also create HTML
documentation in a single (large!) HTML file with the command line
bjam --v2 onehtml
, or Unix man pages with the command
line bjam --v2 man
. The complete list of output
formats is listed in Table 27.1, “BoostBook Output Formats”. Several output formats can
be passed to a single invocation of bjam
, e.g.,
bjam --v2 html man docbook
would generate HTML
(multiple files), man pages, and DocBook documentation.
Table 27.1. BoostBook Output Formats
Format | Description |
---|---|
html | HTML output (multiple files). This is the default |
onehtml | HTML output in a single HTML file. |
man | Unix man pages. |
PDF. Requires Apache FOP. |
|
ps | Postscript. Requires Apache FOP. |
docbook | DocBook. |
fo | XSL Formatting Objects |
The Boost documentation tools are still in their early phase of
development, and some things don't work as seamlessly as we would like
them to, yet. In particular, error messages can be somewhat
uninformative at times. If you find yourself in the situation when
you have double checked everything, and yet things still don't work as
expected, consider helping the tools by deleting
bin.v2
build directory.