People frequently ask for PDF versions of the Ubuntu System Help. We have a toolchain to build them but why not do it yourself?
This is true of any DocBook – dblatex is in the Ubuntu repositories and can transform DocBook in to many formats, the default being PDF.
Usually it is as simple as:
dblatex filename.xml
To generate filename.pdf. Most errors are easy to rectify because dblatex calls other tools and you can step through some (such as pdflatex).
However if you get an error along the lines of:
Overfull @hbox (20.76302pt too wide)
Well that is a bit of a pain. The prescribed wisdom is that something (usually a ulink) is just really too long, such as one of those really long URLs. In the case of DocBook, more often than not it’s a table that it just cannot render – so keep them simple!
