The first line of the document should be
<!doctype debiandoc public "-//DebianDoc//DTD DebianDoc//EN">
or
<!doctype debiandoc system>
to indicate that the document is a Debiandoc-SGML file.
The document should start with the <book> tag and end with </book>.
This should be followed by the <title>, one or more <author>s (each consisting of a <name> and an optional<email>), and optionally a <version>. Each of these is a piece of marked-up inline text - see Marked-up inline text and character style markup, Chapter 4. The <version> may also contain a <date> which stands for the date at the time the document is formatted.
Then may come an <abstract>, a <copyright> notice, and a <toc> marker.
The <abstract> contains a single paragraph.
The <copyright> notice contains one or more copyright summaries followed by one or more paragraphs, the first of which must be indicated by a <p> tag to distinguish it from the summaries.
The <toc> marker specifies that a table of contents is to be produced. The <toc> doesn't contain anything in the SGML source - its contents are generated by the processing systems. The <toc> can have an attribute saying how detailed it should be; for example, <toc sect1> says that subsections should be included, whereas <toc chapt> says that only chapters and appendices should be included. The values allowed are chapt, sect, sect1 and sect2.
Following these parts comes the body of the document - one or more chapters <chapt>, optionally followed by one or more appendices <appendix>.
It is not necessary to mark the end of the <title>, <author>, <version>, <abstract> and <copyright> elements - they are implicitly ended by the start of the next element.
DebianDoc-SGML Manual
13 August 2003ardo@debian.org
ijackson@gnu.ai.mit.edu