# Chapter 3. 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 Section B.2, “Command actions”

`$` 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 Section B.2, “Command actions”

`$` 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 Section B.2, “Command actions”