The manual is marked up using docbook. We then use the docbkx maven plugin to transform the markup to html. This plugin is run when you specify the site goal as in when you run mvn site or you can call the plugin explicitly to just generate the manual by doing mvn docbkx:generate-html (TODO: It looks like you have to run mvn site first because docbkx wants to include a transformed hbase-default.xml. Fix). When you run mvn site, we do the document generation twice, once to generate the multipage manual and then again for the single page manual (the single page version is easier to search).