Skip navigation links
2 Building Documentation Formats »
Section Navigation      [Toggle]

1.2. Tools Required

To build and work with the documentation, you will need to install some additional tools, all of which are open source software with the exception of Microsoft Help Workshop (which is free but not open source). The exact list of tools required will depend on what you plan to do with the documentation.

Note that you also need the mysqldoc-toolset repository, as described above.

  • A text editor capable of handling plain-text files. We use a variety of editors, for example oXygen (a commercial product), vi, kate, jEdit, or Notepad++.

  • make — you will need a standard make tool, either the one provided with your operating system, or preferably GNU make. On Windows, this might require you to install Cygwin or a similar Unix emulator that has make support.

  • XML tools — the XML toolkit from http://xmlsoft.org provides a number of utilities that are required to work with the DocBook XML, including xmllint and xsltproc. You may find that your operating system already comes with the XML tools installed.

  • Perl — is required for some of the additional tools we use to support the production process. In addition to Perl itself, you will also need to install the Expat library, and the XML::Parser::PerlSAX, IO::String, and IO::File modules.

If you want to build PDF versions of the MySQL documentation, you need to install a suitable Java Runtime (v1.5 is recommended) and the Apache FOP tool (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/). At the time of writing this (December 2007) we use FOP 0.20.5.

For image support in PDF files you'll have to install a library such as Jimi or JAI. JAI is available from http://java.sun.com. Jimi is available from http://java.sun.com/products/jimi/.

When installing FOP under Unix/Linux/Mac OS X, install the package into a directory and then create a link to the fop.sh command as fop, for example: 

shell> ln -s /usr/local/fop-0.20.5/bin/fop.sh /usr/local/bin/fop

You may also need to increase the amount of memory allocated to FOP when building the full reference manual. You can do this by adding the -Xmx##m command-line option to the final line of the fop.sh or fop.bat script: 

shell> JAVACMD -Xmx2048m -classpath "$LOCALCLASSPATH" $FOP_OPTS org.apache.fop.apps.Fop "$@"

If you want to build CHM (Compiled HTML) documents then you must use Windows and install the HTML Workshop toolkit from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc.