Introduction to Mallard

Introduction
Why Mallard?
About this book
About Mallard
Pre-requisites
Comparing Mallard to other tools
Projects that use Mallard
Core Mallard
Mallard in action
Basic concepts
Guide pages
Topic pages
Basic tutorial
Integration
Integration requirements
Yelp
Yelp tools
Build system integration
Context-sensitive help
Extended Mallard
Pages and sections
Information element
Linking pages
Titles
Page descriptions
Block elements
Inline elements
Editorial comments
Lists
Tables
style attribute
XInclude
Namespaces
Appendix
Further resources

Pre-requisites

Tools

You will need the following tools to write effectively in Mallard and integrate the results into your software:

A text editor, ideally with XML syntax highlighting,
A Linux system,
Yelp, a viewer for Mallard documents, which is included in the GNOME desktop environment available at http://gnome.org or which can be downloaded separately at https://projects.gnome.org/yelp/download.

Skills

The following skills will help you write documentation in Mallard. You do not need to be an expert at any of these, but you should have basic understanding of these concepts.

Familiarity with markup languages, such as HTML and XML. The organization and presentation of HTML content is determined by tags around the text, such as using <p> to identify a paragraph of text. You should know and understand the terms element, tag, and attribute.
Knowledge of basic command line operation. You should understand what the command line is and be willing to enter commands in it.