The Forrest Hø 00 - lpi-manuals, LPI-101 v0.2

This is both a learning exercise and an investigation of potential of the Apache Forrest publishing system to significantly benefit HøLUG, as hosted on SourceForge.net, and the lpi-manuals project, as hosted at Savannah.

Four Forrest transformations of the "LPI-101 v0.2" OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1 (sxw) file were run. This file was chosen because previous transformations to Docbook XML via "OOWriter" and ooo2sdbk (OpenOffice to Simplified DocBook) were too flawed to work with productively.

The original LPI-101 (sxw) file can be downloaded from here. The resulting transformations are available via the following links, as: HTML, PDF, TXT, and here, as Apache xdoc XML.

This entire project-site was generated and rendered by Apache Forrest 0.7. The raw Apache "Document v1.3 and v2.0" or simply "xdoc" XML that this site is built from can be viewed by clicking on the XML icon in the upper right corner of each HTML page. Also there are icons for TXT and PDF versions of the page, generated from the same XML.

Forrest can be used on any computer with Sun JVM 1.4+, whether it runs on Unix, GNU/Linux or MS Windows. An internet connexion and X.org windowing systems provide the most convenience, but neither are necessary. Superuser ("root" or "administrator") privileges are not required.

Document generation (HTML and other formats) can be performed with Forrest running dynamically or static HTML structures can be generated in batches, both complete with validation, navigation, linking, SVG to PNG graphics generation, and the application of XSL and CSS skins.

Specific content, structure and stylistic changes can be manually made after document or site generation as all source code is accessible and modifiable via any text editor.

Contributors can make submissions via OpenOffice.org SXW or SXI formats, Simplified DocBook XML, various wiki formats (with MoinMoin enjoying some preference in development), or via simply HTML or Apache xdoc XML.

External content can also be collected via RSS news feeds and WYSIWYG editing of XSL is available using the XMLMind XML Editor.

Forrest document production is also integrated with the Subversion CVS and Apache Lenya CMS.

This site provides several other examples of how Forrest can be used to generate and maintain internetworked documentation projects. See the menu at the left. The sources for those examples were provided with the default Forrest 0.70 installation.

For the lpi-manuals project, extra examples were provided to demonstrate how Forrest can generate HTML, Text, PDF and Apache xdoc XML versions of the LPI-101 v0.2 OpenOffice.org Writer (sxw) file via Forrest's input.OpenOffice.org plugin.

In the tests for ForrestHø00, the PDF format was not generated by Forrest. Insufficient RAM prevented the PDF (ie, "FOP") conversion. Memory-management options for Forrest are available, however. (See the "FAQ" tab above and search for "memory". But time ran out before they could be learned and tried.

Notably, after adding the LPI-101 v0.2 sxw file to input, site-generation time jumped from some 4-5 minutes for the original site-template, on an older IBM ThinkPad 600x PIII with 256MB RAM running on SuSE Linux 9.3 (GNU/Linux 2.6.11.x, medium load), to 18-27 minutes

Once that file was processed, however, site generation times fell back to 7-10 minutes, likely due to the make-like build management of Apache Ant, which forms part of Forrest's core.

More detail is given at the OOO v1.1 Forrest Transformation Examples page.