How to contribute

First of all you must put up a full DockBook environment to test and translate your XML to HTML or PDF or whatever. Then you must set up a CVS client.

If you are working in a UNIX environment of any flavour, and Linux in particular, these tools are there by default or are anyway easily recoverable in your installation CD or in the net.

For Windows too there are free softwares to accessaCVS server and handle DocBook XML, but these needs to be downloaded from the net.

Once you have a full CVS and DocBook install you can download the complede blender documentation XML and work on it!

If you would like to contribute changes, additions or correction to the Blender documentation, we prefer to receive them as patches to the DocBook/XML files. Assuming some basic knowledge about CVS usage, this is easy. Here's how you do it:

First of all, before you start working check out the latest CVS tree and work on those files directly. Changes are made to the CVS repository almost daily and you don't want to work on outdated files. Updates are fast as only the changes are downloaded to your workstation.

When you're ready, you issue the following command:

cvs diff -u -w BlenderManual.xml > BlenderManual.xml.diff

The differences between your local copy and the copy in the CVS repository will be stored in BlenderManual.xml.diff. If you want to submit multiple patches, please do a diff for each file separately and send them to the DocBoard mailing list.