Editing and publishing CLP documentation with DocBook requires that some important tools be installed. It is likely that all or most of these tools are already in place on a typical *nix (e.g. Linux) system. Windows users should strongly consider installing Cygwin, as this tutorial assumes a *nix environment for DocBook development. In fact, the following instructions for installation are for Cygwin and Red Hat Linux, (and should not be altogether different for another *nix system).

The necessary Cygwin packages can all be found in the "Doc" section of the categorical view of Cygwin's setup.exe. The user should verify that all of them are selected (because there may not be adequate dependency rules to ensure that all the correct packages are installed). The packages in question are:

According to The Selfdocbook (XML Edition), the Red Hat Linux (7.3) packages needed are:

The Selfdocbook also lists a few other packages, but they are not necessary for HTML output (this tutorial does not (yet) address how to create output in other formats such as PDF).

The last of the packages, xmlto, is a shell script which facilitates the conversion of DocBook documents to HTML and other formats. If all the tools are properly installed, creating an HTML version of this tutorial, for example, is as trivial as typing xmlto html docbook4clp.xml at the command line. But before jumping in to work with DocBook, there are some important issues which need to be addressed.