5.0 KiB
The Ardour Manual
This is the project that generates the static ardour manual website available at manual.ardour.org. The site is built using python 3.
Get the code
git clone <repo-url> ardour-manual
cd ardour-manual
Structure of the content
There are 2 different types of content:
- a master document which describes the overall structure of the manual
- normal content, which is described in the master document
The Master Document
This is a text file (master-doc.txt) which describes the structure of the manual. It does this through headers which tell the build script where the content lives, what its relationship to the overall structure is, as well as a few other things.
All headers have a similar structure, and have to have at least the following minimal structure:
---
title: Some Wordy and Expressive Title
part: part
---
Keywords that go into the header are of the form:
keyword: value
Here are the keywords you can put in, and a brief description of what they do:
Keyword | Meaning |
---|---|
title | Sets the title for the content that follows |
menu_title | Sets the title for the content that follows which will appear in the menu link sidebar. If this is not specified, it defaults to the value of the title keyword |
part | Sets the hierarchy for the content that follows. It must be one of the following (listed in order of lowering hierarchy): part, chapter, subchapter, section, subsection |
link | Sets the unbreakable link to the content that follows. Links in the content should be prefixed with a double at-sign (@@) to tell the build system that the link is an internal one |
include | Tells the build system that the content lives in an external file; these normally live in the include/ directory. Note that the filename should not be prefixed with include/ |
exclude | Tells the implode and explode scripts that file referred to by the include keyword should be ignored. Note that the value of this keyword is ignored |
pdf-exclude | Does not include the content in the generated PDF, but links to its online contents. The value is also ignored. |
style | Sets an alternate CSS stylesheet; the name should match the one referred to (sans the .css suffix) in the source/css directory |
uri | Sets an absolute URI where this page will go in the hierachy of the created website. It does not change the document structure |
Normal content
Manual content goes into the include/
directory (or in the Master Document
itself); and consists of normal HTML, sans the usual headers that is normally
seen in regular HTML web pages. Any other content, such as css files, images,
files and fixed pages goes into the source/
directory.
Adding source/images/horse.png
makes it available at the url
/images/horse.png
after publishing it; things work similarly for
source/files/
and source/css/
.
CSS
The manual uses Bootstrap for its global layout, and a few custom CSS files that contains classes used for keys, menus, tables, etc... so it is recommanded to have a look at it first, or at least see how other pages are made to keep the manual consistent in its appearance:
source/css/common.css
contains shared classes between all media and is included everywheresource/css/screen.css
adds classes used for screen display (html)source/css/pdf.css
adds classes used for print (pdf)source/css/luadocs.css
adds classes used in the Lua script documentation
More Advanced Stuff
You probably don't want or need to do any of this, but here are some notes just in case you decide to anyway.
Run it locally
You may want the manual available on a machine that doesn't have constant
internet access. You will need git
, python3
and cherrypy
python module installed.
- Download code and build manual
git clone <repo-url> ardour-manual
cd ardour-manual
./build.py
- Run the following:
./servit.py
- The manual will now be available at http://127.0.0.1:8080
(Ctrl-c to quit the server).
Helper scripts: implode
and explode
The implode
and explode
scripts exist in order to accomodate different
working styles. implode
takes all the files referenced by the include
keywords in the headers in the Master Document and automagically puts them into
the Master Document in their proper places. Note that any header that has an
exclude
keyword will remain in the include/
directory. explode
does the
inverse of implode
; it takes all the content in the Master Document and blows
it into individual files in the include/
directory.
Build options
The build.py
script that builds the manual accepts the following options:
- '-v', or '--verbose', to display the high-level structure of the manual
- '-q', or '--quiet', to suppress all output (overrides -v)
- '-d', or '--devmode', to add content to pages to help developers debug them (link, file name, URL)
- '-n', or '--nopdf', to prevent the build script from generate a PDF from the content