Once you have everything set up, change to the directory
doc/src/sgml and run one of the commands
described in the following subsections to build the
documentation. (Remember to use GNU make.)
To build the HTML version of the documentation:
doc/src/sgml$make html
This is also the default target. The output appears in the
subdirectory html.
To produce HTML documentation with the stylesheet used on postgresql.org instead of the default simple style use:
doc/src/sgml$make STYLE=website html
If the STYLE=website option is used, the generated HTML
files include references to stylesheets hosted on postgresql.org and
require network access to view.
We use the DocBook XSL stylesheets to
convert DocBook
refentry pages to *roff output suitable for man
pages. To create the man pages, use the command:
doc/src/sgml$make man
To produce a PDF rendition of the documentation using FOP, you can use one of the following commands, depending on the preferred paper format:
For A4 format:
doc/src/sgml$make postgres-A4.pdf
For U.S. letter format:
doc/src/sgml$make postgres-US.pdf
Because the PostgreSQL documentation is fairly
big, FOP will require a significant amount of
memory. Because of that, on some systems, the build will fail with a
memory-related error message. This can usually be fixed by configuring
Java heap settings in the configuration
file ~/.foprc, for example:
# FOP binary distribution FOP_OPTS='-Xmx1500m' # Debian JAVA_ARGS='-Xmx1500m' # Red Hat ADDITIONAL_FLAGS='-Xmx1500m'
There is a minimum amount of memory that is required, and to some extent more memory appears to make things a bit faster. On systems with very little memory (less than 1 GB), the build will either be very slow due to swapping or will not work at all.
Other XSL-FO processors can also be used manually, but the automated build process only supports FOP.
The installation instructions are also distributed as plain text,
in case they are needed in a situation where better reading tools
are not available. The INSTALL file
corresponds to Chapter 16, with some minor
changes to account for the different context. To recreate the
file, change to the directory doc/src/sgml
and enter make INSTALL. Building text output
requires Pandoc version 1.13 or newer as an
additional build tool.
In the past, the release notes and regression testing instructions were also distributed as plain text, but this practice has been discontinued.
Building the documentation can take very long. But there is a method to just check the correct syntax of the documentation files, which only takes a few seconds:
doc/src/sgml$make check