Publican brands for Fedora, Genome, and oVirt documents are available as RPM packages in Fedora. Similarly, Red Hat internally distributes RPM packages containing Publican brands for GIMP, JBoss, and Red Hat documents. Providing that you have access to the relevant repositories, you can install these brands on a computer that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora — or an operating system derived from either — with the command yum install publican-brand or with a graphical package manager such as PackageKit.

If you use Publican on an operating system that does not use RPM packages, your documentation project might provide its brand in another format. Whatever the format in which the brand is supplied, you must place the brand files in a subdirectory of the Publican Common_Content directory. By default, this directory is located at /usr/share/publican/Common_Content on Linux operating systems and at %SystemDrive%/%ProgramFiles%/Publican/Common_Content on Windows operating systems — typically, C:/Program Files/Publican/Common_Content

Each currently available brand is distributed under a brand-specific license as follows:

To install the brand:

Note the difference in licensing between the common content files provided in the common brand (CC0) and the default license set for books generated with the common brand (GFDL). The CC0 license allows you to redistribute and relicense the files that make up the common brand (including the CSS and image files) to suit your project. Publican suggests the GFDL for documentation by default because Publican is developed primarily to build documentation for software. The GFDL is compatible with the GPL, which is the most commonly used license for open-source software.

Use the create_brand action to create a new brand. When you create a new brand, you must give it a name and specify the original language for the brand's XML files. The --name option provides the name, and the --lang option specifies the language. The complete command is therefore:

publican create_brand --name=brand --lang=language_code

Publican creates a new subdirectory named publican-brand, where brand is the brand that you specified with the --name option.

For example, to create a brand called Acme, which will have its Common Content XML files written originally in American English, run:

publican create_brand --name=Acme --lang=en-US

Publican creates the brand in a subdirectory named publican-Acme.

To configure your new brand, search for the word SETUP in the default files that Publican creates and edit the files to provide the missing details. On Linux operating systems, you can search for the word SETUP in these files with the command:

grep -r 'SETUP' *

Running the publican create_brand --name=brand --lang=language_code command creates a directory structure and the required files. The brand directory initially contains:

After you create a brand (as described in Section 4.2, “Creating a brand”), Publican can help you to distribute the brand to members of your documentation project as RPM packages. RPM packages are used to distribute software to computers with Linux operating systems that use the RPM Package Manager. These operating systems include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Mandriva Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Turbolinux, and Yellow Dog Linux, to name just a few.

Publican can produce both source RPM packages (SRPM packages) and binary RPM packages. As part of this process, it also creates the spec file — the file that contains the details of how a package is configured and installed.

SRPM packages contain the source code used to generate software rather than the software itself. To use an SRPM package, a computer must compile the source code into software. SRPM packages of Publican brands contain the configuration files, XML files, and image files that define the brand in its original language, plus the PO files that generate the Common Content files in translated languages. You cannot install documentation directly from SRPM packages with current versions of the RPM Package Manager.

Conversely, binary RPM packages contain software — in this case, a Publican brand — that is ready to copy to a location in the computer's file system and use immediately. The contents of the binary RPM package do not need to be compiled by the computer onto which they are installed, and therefore, the computer does not need to have Publican installed.

To package a brand, use the publican package command in the brand directory. When used without any further options, Publican produces an SRPM package. The options for packaging a brand are as follows:

The --lang, --desktop and --short_sighted options that apply when you package books (described in Section 3.8, “Packaging a document”) are meaningless when you package brands. In particular, note that although the --lang option is mandatory when you package a book, you do not need to use it when you package a brand.

By default, Publican brand packages are named:

publican-brand-version-release.build_target.noarch.file_extension.

Publican uses the information in the publican.cfg file to supply the various parameters in the file name. Refer to Section 4.3.1, “The publican.cfg file” for details of configuring this file. Additionally: