This chapter describes how to understand and use the files that make
up the DocBook distribution. Parts of this discussion are relatively technical.
If you are unfamiliar with reading and understanding DTD constructs, you may
need to refer to other SGML resources for help.
To use DocBook "out of the box," do the following:
Point your application to a valid series of mappings between
the formal public identifiers used in DocBook and the system files corresponding
to the DocBook modules. (You can use the docbook.cat
catalog file, provided with the DocBook distribution, for this purpose; you
may need to edit this file to make it point to accurate file locations on
your system.)
Use a DOCTYPE declaration in
your SGML documents as follows, providing your top-level element name as the
document type name:
<!DOCTYPE element-name PUBLIC "-//Davenport//DTD DocBook V2.4.1//EN">
<element-name>
⋮
</element-name>
For example (assuming no need for an internal declaration subset):
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Davenport//DTD DocBook V2.4.1//EN">
<book>
⋮
</book>
Before validating or processing any documents, you may need to prepare
or compile DocBook in some fashion for use with your software.