1[/ 2 Copyright 2002,2004,2006 Joel de Guzman, Eric Niebler 3 Copyright 2010-2011 Daniel James 4 5 Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. 6 (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at 7 http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) 8] 9 10[chapter Introduction 11 [quickbook 1.7] 12 [compatibility-mode 1.5] 13 [id quickbook.intro] 14 [source-mode teletype] 15] 16 17[:[*['["Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your 18life automating?]]] 19 20-- Terrence Parr, author ANTLR/PCCTS 21] 22 23Well, QuickBook started as a weekend hack. It was originally intended to be a 24sample application using __spirit__. What is it? What you are viewing now, this 25documentation, is autogenerated by QuickBook. These files were generated from 26one master: 27 28[:[@boost:/tools/quickbook/doc/quickbook.qbk quickbook.qbk]] 29 30Originally named QuickDoc, this funky tool that never dies, evolved into a 31funkier tool thanks to Eric Niebler who resurrected the project making it 32generate __boostbook__ instead of HTML. The __boostbook__ documentation format 33is an extension of __docbook__, an SGML or XML based format for describing 34documentation. 35 36[tip You don't need to know anything about __boostbook__ or __docbook__ 37to use QuickBook. A basic understanding of __docbook__ might help, but 38shouldn't be necessary. For really advanced stuff you will need to know 39__docbook__, but you can ignore it at first, and maybe continue to do so. 40] 41 42QuickBook is a WikiWiki style documentation tool geared towards C++ 43documentation using simple rules and markup for simple formatting tasks. 44QuickBook extends the WikiWiki concept. Like the WikiWiki, QuickBook documents are 45simple text files. A single QuickBook document can generate a fully linked set 46of nice HTML and PostScript/PDF documents complete with images and syntax- 47colorized source code. 48 49Features include: 50 51* generate __boostbook__ xml, to generate HTML, PostScript and PDF 52* simple markup to link to Doxygen-generated entities 53* macro system for simple text substitution 54* simple markup for italics, bold, preformatted, blurbs, code samples, 55 tables, URLs, anchors, images, etc. 56* automatic syntax coloring of code samples 57* CSS support 58