To build the HTML version of the documentation:

doc/src/sgml$ make html

This is also the default target. The output appears in the subdirectory html.

To produce HTML documentation with the stylesheet used on postgresql.org instead of the default simple style use:

doc/src/sgml$ make STYLE=website html

If the STYLE=website option is used, the generated HTML files include references to stylesheets hosted on postgresql.org and require network access to view.

We use the DocBook XSL stylesheets to convert DocBook refentry pages to *roff output suitable for man pages. To create the man pages, use the command:

doc/src/sgml$ make man

To produce a PDF rendition of the documentation using FOP, you can use one of the following commands, depending on the preferred paper format:

Because the PostgreSQL documentation is fairly big, FOP will require a significant amount of memory. Because of that, on some systems, the build will fail with a memory-related error message. This can usually be fixed by configuring Java heap settings in the configuration file ~/.foprc, for example:

# FOP binary distribution
FOP_OPTS='-Xmx1500m'
# Debian
JAVA_ARGS='-Xmx1500m'
# Red Hat
ADDITIONAL_FLAGS='-Xmx1500m'

There is a minimum amount of memory that is required, and to some extent more memory appears to make things a bit faster. On systems with very little memory (less than 1 GB), the build will either be very slow due to swapping or will not work at all.

In its default configuration FOP will emit an INFO message for each page. The log level can be changed via ~/.foprc:

LOGCHOICE=-Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=​org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog
LOGLEVEL=-Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog=WARN

Other XSL-FO processors can also be used manually, but the automated build process only supports FOP.

The installation instructions are also distributed as plain text, in case they are needed in a situation where better reading tools are not available. The INSTALL file corresponds to Chapter 17, with some minor changes to account for the different context. To recreate the file, change to the directory doc/src/sgml and enter make INSTALL. Building text output requires Pandoc version 1.13 or newer as an additional build tool.

In the past, the release notes and regression testing instructions were also distributed as plain text, but this practice has been discontinued.

Building the documentation can take very long. But there is a method to just check the correct syntax of the documentation files, which only takes a few seconds:

doc/src/sgml$ make check