# Publican commands

Publican is a command-line tool. To use Publican on a computer with a Linux operating system, you must either start a terminal emulator program (such as GNOME Terminal or Konsole) or switch to a virtual console. To use Publican on a computer with a Windows operating system, run the `cmd` command from the Start menu to open a command prompt.

Publican commands take one of the following formats:

$ `publican command_option`

  The command_option is any of several options for the $ `publican` command itself. For a complete list of actions see

$ `publican action action_options`

  The action is an action for Publican to perform, such as creating the XML files for a new document or building a HTML document from a document's XML files. The action_options apply to the action, such as specifying the language of a document. For a complete list of actions see

$ `publican command_option action action_options`

  Some command_options affect the output of actions, for example, whether Publican should use ANSI colors in its output. For a complete list of actions and options see