A tour of some DocBook features

This chapter gives a tour of the various DocBook features I expect you will need to use, and tells you how to use them. In some cases DocBook allows you to do something in more than one way. In those cases, I will tell you how we have agreed to do those things at Cygnus.

Global markups

Your docbook document will always have a top level element. In the examples above it was book, but it can be article, set, part, chapter and one of many more. tags.

I suspect that as a hacker, rather than a professional doc writer, you will usually be in one of two situations: either you are writing an article or essay yourself (in which case you will probably use article as a top level element) or you will be working within the structure of an existing book or set of books (in which case you will probably be using book or chapter as your top level element.

Books

A book will be structured in the following way:

    book
      meta information
      chapter
        sect1
        sect1
      chapter
        sect1
      appendix
        sect1
      appendix
        sect1
        …
      glossary
  

Articles

An article will be structured in the following way:

    article
      meta information
      sect1
      sect1
        sect2
      sect1
      …