To understand the process leading to the generation of a final document, we'll detail here the steps taken to generate an HTML file.
In Figure 7.3, “Distributing Makefiles” we represent the way from the master.top.xml skeleton guidelines to the final HTML book.
We can distinguish two main steps:
Generation of the <book>.flat.xml source file. This file contains all the XML source code necessary to compile the document. It is “flat” because all modules and entities have been expanded into it. To do so it's been necessary to:
Compute a possible index,
Check that all needed modules are available.
Catalog all entities.
Actual HTML Compilation. This includes the generation of all necessary images which names are extracted from <book>.flat.xml.