Asciidoctor comes in several flavors: a Ruby gem (Asciidoctor), a Java bundle (AsciidoctorJ), and transpiled JavaScript (Asciidoctor.js). Only the Asciidoctor and AsciidoctorJ flavors are supported for building the Wireshark documentation and AsciidoctorJ is recommended.

The guides and release notes were originally written in DocBook (hence the directory name). They were later converted to AsciiDoc and then migrated to Asciidoctor. We currently use Asciidoctor’s modern (>= 1.5.0) syntax.

PDF output requires Asciidoctor PDF. It is included with AsciidoctorJ but not with Asciidoctor.

Converting from DocBook to HTML and CHM requires the DocBook DTD (http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ToolsSetup.html) and DocBook stylesheets (http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/InstallStylesheets.html). These are available via installable packages on most Linux distributions, Chocolatey, and Homebrew.

xsltproc converts DocBook XML to various formats based on XSL stylesheets. It either ships as part of the operating system or is available via an installable package on most Linux distributions, Chocolatey, and Homebrew.

HTML Help is used to create the User’s and Developer’s Guide in .chm format. The User’s Guide .chm file is included with the NSIS and WiX installers and is used as Wireshark’s built-in help on Windows.

This compiler is used to generate a .chm file from a bunch of HTML files — in our case to generate the User’s and Developer’s Guide in .chm format.

The compiler is only available as the free (as in beer) "HTML Help Workshop" download. If you want to compile the guides yourself, you need to download and install this. If you don’t install it into the default directory, you may also have a look at the HHC_DIR setting in the file docbook/Makefile.

The files htmlhelp.c and htmlhelp.lib are required to be able to open .chm files from Wireshark and show the online help. Both files are part of the SDK (standalone (P)SDK or MSVC since 2002).