To understand the process leading to the generation of a final document, we'll detail here the steps taken to generate an HTML file.
In Figure 7.3, “Distributing Makefiles” we represent the
way from the master.top.xml
skeleton
guidelines to the final HTML book.
We can distinguish two main steps:
Generation of the
<book>.flat.xml
source
file. This file contains all the XML source
code necessary to compile the document. It is
“flat” because all modules and entities have
been expanded into it. To do so it's been necessary to:
Compute a possible index,
Check that all needed modules are available.
Catalog all entities.
Actual HTML Compilation. This includes
the generation of all necessary images which names are
extracted from
<book>.flat.xml
.