KiCad Documentation
This repository contains the official KiCad documentation.
Contributing
You can discuss the documentation and its translations in the repository issues.
To participate to the translation effort read the translation_instructions.adoc.
Submit your translation pull requests to the stable docs branch 4.0, please.
See docs-versioning.adoc for details about docs versioning.
The following instructions explain how to test changes before submitting a pull-request.
Dependencies
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AsciiDoc >= 8.6.9 is both the language of the documentation and the tool used to generate the PDF and HTML outputs.
We will probably switch to asciidoctor in the future, when asciidoctor tools are stable enough, because of their abilility to generate PDF and epub document formats directly without the intervention of any other external tool or intemediate format like dblatex or docbook. See the asciidoctor-pdf project.
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po4a >= 0.45 is used to translate the English AsciiDoc documentation to other languages before the last compilation steps.
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CMake >= 2.8
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dblatex >= 0.3.4
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gettext >= 0.18
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source-highlight
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The VL Gothic font is required when you build the japanese PDFs. Look for a package named
fonts-vlgothic. Otherwise use the SINGLE_LANGUAGE option to avoid build errors.
Debian / Ubuntu
To install the dependencies on Debian / Ubuntu run the following (requires about 1.5GiB of space):
sudo apt-get install git make cmake asciidoc pandoc gettext po4a dblatex texlive-xetex fonts-vlgothic source-highlight texlive-lang-english texlive-lang-french texlive-lang-italian texlive-lang-japanese texlive-lang-dutch texlive-lang-polish texlive-lang-german texlive-lang-cyrillic
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Note
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in Ubuntu 14:04 there is no texlive-lang-japanese. Install texlive-lang-cjk instead. |
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Note
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in Debian Jessie the package texlive-lang-dutch is a transitional package, Install texlive-lang-european instead. |
or, if you do not have space problems:
sudo apt-get install git make cmake asciidoc pandoc gettext po4a dblatex texlive-xetex fonts-vlgothic source-highlight texlive-lang-all
Fedora
To install the dependencies on Fedora run the following:
sudo dnf install git make cmake asciidoc pandoc gettext po4a dblatex source-highlight texlive vlgothic-fonts perl-Unicode-LineBreak texlive-scheme-full texlive-collection-xetex gnu-free-serif-fonts gnu-free-mono-fonts gnu-free-sans-fonts
Building the docs
Windows
Start with windows_dependencies.adoc then run:
cd kicad-doc mkdir build cd build cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DPDF_GENERATOR=FOP ../ make
MacOS / Linux
cd kicad-doc mkdir build cd build cmake ../ make
Docker
Read utils/docker/README.adoc if you want to build the documentation in a container.
CMake Build Options
BUILD_FORMATS
By default BUILD_FORMATS is set to html;pdf;epub to enable building all supported
document formats.
It’s possible to set BUILD_FORMATS in order to build only a subset of formats,
e.g. -DBUILD_FORMATS=html
When only one build format is enabled the package name is transformed to include the format.
SINGLE_LANGUAGE
By default CMake will configure to build all languages available for each document.
You can build just a single language by using the SINGLE_LANGUAGE option when
configuring a build with CMake, e.g. -DSINGLE_LANGUAGE=it, etc.
Currently, the available languages are : en, fr, it, ja, nl, and pl however, any
language code can be selected. Only translated documents will be built, so for
some languages there may only be a partial documentation output.
When the SINGLE_LANGUAGE option is set, the package name is transformed to include the language.
PDF_GENERATOR
By default CMake will use dblatex building PDFs.
You can build PDFs however using either DBLATEX or FOP by using the
PDF_GENERATOR option whilst configuring a CMake build.
For example, use -DPDF_GENERATOR=FOP to use FOP to build the PDFs. If the
BUILD_FORMATS option doesn’t include pdf, the PDF_GENERATOR option
will have no effect on the build.
This option doesn’t transform the built package name.
Packaging the docs
The docs use CMake as mentioned earlier, so to install it as a packager use the normal CMake way, for example:
mkdir build; cd build cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .. make install
And if on OS X you might want something like:
mkdir build; cd build cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/Library/Application Support/kicad" .. make install