Dependencies

Pandoc, a universal document converter, is required to generate docs as HTML from Rust's source code.

Node.js is also required for generating HTML from the Markdown docs (reference manual, tutorials, etc.) distributed with this git repository.

po4a is required for generating translated docs from the master (English) docs.

GNU gettext is required for managing the translation data.

Building

To generate all the docs, just run make docs from the root of the repository. This will convert the distributed Markdown docs to HTML and generate HTML doc for the 'std' and 'extra' libraries.

To generate HTML documentation from one source file/crate, do something like:

rustdoc --output-dir html-doc/ --output-format html ../src/libstd/path.rs

(This, of course, requires a working build of the rustdoc tool.)

Additional notes

To generate an HTML version of a doc from Markdown without having Node.js installed, you can do something like:

pandoc --from=markdown --to=html5 --number-sections -o rust.html rust.md

(rust.md being the Rust Reference Manual.)

The syntax for pandoc flavored markdown can be found at: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown

A nice quick reference (for non-pandoc markdown) is at: http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/quickref.html

Notes for translators

Notice: The procedure described below is a work in progress. We are working on translation system but the procedure contains some manual operations for now.

To start the translation for a new language, see po4a.conf at first.

To generate .pot and .po files, do something like:

po4a --copyright-holder="The Rust Project Developers" \
    --package-name="Rust" \
    --package-version="0.10-pre" \
    -M UTF-8 -L UTF-8 \
    src/doc/po4a.conf

(the version number must be changed if it is not 0.10-pre now.)

Now you can translate documents with .po files, commonly used with gettext. If you are not familiar with gettext-based translation, please read the online manual linked from http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/ . We use UTF-8 as the file encoding of .po files.

When you want to make a commit, do the command below before staging your change:

for f in src/doc/po/**/*.po; do
    msgattrib --translated $f -o $f.strip
    if [ -e $f.strip ]; then
       mv $f.strip $f
    else
       rm $f
    fi
done

This removes untranslated entries from .po files to save disk space.