Once you have everything set up, change to the directory
   doc/src/sgml and run one of the commands
   described in the following subsections to build the
   documentation. (Remember to use GNU make.)
  
To build the HTML version of the documentation:
doc/src/sgml$make html
    This is also the default target.  The output appears in the
    subdirectory html.
   
To produce HTML documentation with the stylesheet used on postgresql.org instead of the default simple style use:
doc/src/sgml$make STYLE=website html
   We use the DocBook XSL stylesheets to
   convert DocBook
   refentry pages to *roff output suitable for man
   pages.  To create the man pages, use the command:
doc/src/sgml$make man
To produce a PDF rendition of the documentation using FOP, you can use one of the following commands, depending on the preferred paper format:
For A4 format:
doc/src/sgml$make postgres-A4.pdf
For U.S. letter format:
doc/src/sgml$make postgres-US.pdf
    Because the PostgreSQL documentation is fairly
    big, FOP will require a significant amount of
    memory.  Because of that, on some systems, the build will fail with a
    memory-related error message.  This can usually be fixed by configuring
    Java heap settings in the configuration
    file ~/.foprc, for example:
# FOP binary distribution FOP_OPTS='-Xmx1500m' # Debian JAVA_ARGS='-Xmx1500m' # Red Hat ADDITIONAL_FLAGS='-Xmx1500m'
There is a minimum amount of memory that is required, and to some extent more memory appears to make things a bit faster. On systems with very little memory (less than 1 GB), the build will either be very slow due to swapping or will not work at all.
Other XSL-FO processors can also be used manually, but the automated build process only supports FOP.
    The installation instructions are also distributed as plain text,
    in case they are needed in a situation where better reading tools
    are not available.  The INSTALL file
    corresponds to Chapter 16, with some minor
    changes to account for the different context.  To recreate the
    file, change to the directory doc/src/sgml
    and enter make INSTALL.  Building text output
    requires Pandoc version 1.13 or newer as an
    additional build tool.
   
In the past, the release notes and regression testing instructions were also distributed as plain text, but this practice has been discontinued.
Building the documentation can take very long. But there is a method to just check the correct syntax of the documentation files, which only takes a few seconds:
doc/src/sgml$make check