The Rbmake Project

Rbmake is a "book maker" for the Rocket eBook. It consists of a set of commandline tools that assemble or disassemble .rb files -- the book format that is native to the ReB. The C code also contains a library of routines that can be linked into other applications.

Rbmake is being hosted at sourceforge.net, so feel free to visit its project page. There you'll find the links you need to download the source or binaries, report bugs, and chat on the mailing list. Also, feel free to check out the ChangeLog file or to email the author. I'd love to hear from people who'd like to help out, or are just enjoying the tools.

Authoring Tips

If you're creating content for the Rocket eBook, you should check out the new Authoring Tips page. This will help you to get the most out of rbmake in those times when you want to take full control of the tags.

New Features

If you're just trying to see what's new, be sure to visit the tools page to see a few of the new things that various tools can do. The newest items will always be on the top of the list of features. Also, don't miss the sample option files that show off some of the advanced configuration features of rbmake.

If you're installing the Win32 zip files, all the relevant EXEs are already supplied for you in one zip file: w32-rbmake-1.2.zip. Unzip this into a single directory, and put that directory on your PATH (or choose a directory that is already on your path) and you're done.

The source and rpm releases require the presence of a couple other packages for you to be able to build and/or install rbmake. If you are installing the binary rpm, all the relevant dependencies will be checked automatically for you, especially the first item in the following list:

Required These items are needed for both the binary and source distributions. You need a reasonably recent version of libxml2: at least version 2.3.1. You can download libxml2 from www.xmlsoft.org, or run a query for libxml2 (and perhaps libxml2-devel) at rpmfind.net.

The pcre (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions) library is required for various text-rewriting features of the library and its tools. Either search for it at rpmfind.net or visit the pcre web site and download the source tar from there.

The zlib is also required to be able to handle the file compression. Most "modern" OSs already have this available. If you can't track it down, it is available from the infozip ftp site and can be easily found via an rpmfind.net search. Suggested These items are optional if you build your own version from source. If you get one of my binary releases, you need to install binary versions of these to get the rpm to install. If you want to be able to include images in the books, we use the image libraries libpng and libjpeg to read and (in the case of libpng) write image info (a GIF reader is built into the source). If you don't have libpng installed, rbmake won't be able to do any image processing. If you don't have libjpeg installed, you won't be able to import any .jpg images. If you plan to build rbmake (or rbmake-using tools), you'll need to install the "devel" version of these packages. Most modern OSes have these libraries installed already, but you can find them easily enough by doing a search at rpmfind.net. Optional The following item is not currently used in my binary releases, and has not been used by me in quite some time (let me know if you encounter any problems): If you have the W3C's libwww installed, rbmake will choose to use that library to fetch the web pages (as it can fetch several web pages in parallel). Without this, rbmake just uses the simple HTTP support that is present in libxml2.

Documentation

You can read about the commandline tools, the library interface, or a summary of how the .rb file is put together.

Also available is the rbmake documentation pages in .rb book format.

Rbmake was created by Wayne Davison with some hashing code written by Geoffrey Collyer and some image routines written by Jef Poskanzer. See the license information for more detailed copyright info.