Technology used to create this book
As an author of open source tools myself, I'm a big believer in their power and capability. So I made an effort to use them wherever possible in creating this book. I wasn't about to write it in Microsoft Word and then handle layout with Adobe FrameMaker!
Nmap Network Scanning was written with the GNU Emacs text editor in the DocBook XML format.
The free online chapters are created from the XML using Norman Walsh's XSL Stylesheets and the xsltproc XSL processor
The print version also uses Norman's stylesheets and xsltproc,
but the output is to
the XSL-FO
format An XSL-FO processor is then used to build a PDF. I
would like to
use Apache FOP
for this, but
a footnote-related
bug prevents this, so I switched to the RenderX XEP
Engine XEP is proprietary, but at least it runs on Linux.
I hope to switch back to FOP after the footnote bug is fixed.
Cover layout was done with Scribus Raster graphics for
the cover and internal illustrations was done with Gimp, while Inkscape was used for vector
graphics.
Revision control was handled by Subversion and the free web chapters are serviced with Apache httpd