It's easiest if you get your PlainDoc system already compiled and installed by someone, but if you are familiar with building open source software, building all of your own tool chains is certainly feasible. The pd2tex itself is a perl(1) program so it does not need any compilation, but it depends on many other programs so you need to have them in order to have a "tool chain". In this chapter I explain how I built mine and try to give some tips.
In the very minimum you will need perl(1). Generally perl comes with just about any Linux distribution and with most other Unixes so this is not a major obstacle. With perl only, you will be able to generate HTML output as well as .dbx and .tex intermediate files. To further process the latter two, you will need to install additional tools.
teTeX variant of LaTeX usually ships with Linux distributions and is easily obtained and installed for other Unixes. For Windows MikTeX is the best alternative. DocBook toolchains are not explained any further here: refer to your favorite web search.
Since a lot of information here depends on the particular versions of the software packages and is always in flux, you should expect some discrepancies when you actually build your own system. If my receipe does not work for you, please study the documentation (usually INSTALL and/or README files in the top directory of each software package's source code tree) and try to build it the way they recommend.
These receipes were created around Sept. 2004. You can expect that these instructions will be updated from time to time.
Table 7:Software versions
| Ware & Version | Web | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| perl-5.6.x | perl.org (perl-5.8.x also works) | which perl && perl --version |
| gnuplot-4.0.0 | ftp://ftp.gnuplot.info/pub/gnuplot/ http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net | which gnuplot && gnuplot --version |
| graphviz-1.16 | www.graphviz.org | which dot && dot -V |
| gs-8.53 | www.ghostrscript.com | which gs && gs --version |
| dia-0.94sampo | http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ | (version 0.96.1 also works) |
| gcc-3.4.2 | gcc.gnu.org | which gcc && gcc --version |
| binutils-2.15.91.0.2 | ftp.gnu.org | which ld && ld --version |
| glibc-2.3.3 | ftp.gnu.org | ls -al /lib/libc-*.so |
N.B. gcc(1), binutils(1), and glibc(3) are probably only worth worrying about if you plan to build everything from sources.
The perl dependency is not very sensitive, because pd2tex(1) does not use any perl modules (except the ones that distribute as standard). While the development work happens currently (Apr 2006) on perl-5.8.4 system, no exotic features are used, so it should work with perl-5.6 and may even work with perl-5.003. I'm interested in patches to ensure backwards compatibility.