Re: [Patch 0/5] Create single PDF for all HTML files

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 6, 2012, 19:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20121006193205.GD3644@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <505841759.269631.1349538675925.JavaMail.ngmail@webmail08.arcor-online.net>

On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:51:15PM +0200, Thomas Ackermann wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I wanted to have a single PDF file which contains the complete Git documentation 
> (except user-manual) for easier reading on my tablet. The simplest way to do 
> this was by using wkhtmltopdf which can combine a set of HTML files into a sinlge 
> PDF file and also apply some reformatting. To this end HTML files for all the missing 
> files in Documentation/technical and Documentation/howto and also for all the 
> release notes in Documentation/RelNotes were created.

It seems like a reasonable goal. I do not have a strong opinion on the approach or how the final output looks, but I wasn't able to actually get output at all after applying your patches. Running "make fullpdf" (after installing dblatex) got me:

  The switch --book, is not support using unpatched qt, and will be
  ignored.The switch --footer-html, is not support using unpatched qt,
  and will be ignored.The switch --disable-external-links, is not
  support using unpatched qt, and will be ignored.

after which wkhtmltopdf began pegging my CPU. I let it run for 10 minutes before giving up.

Another way of doing this would be to format the individual troff manpages into dvi or postscript, convert that into pdf, and then concatenate that. Something like:

  for i in *.[157]; do
    man -Tdvi -l "$i" >"$i.dvi"
    dvipdfm "$i"
  done
  pdftk *.[157].pdf cat output full.pdf

works for me, though obviously that does not handle some of the non-man items you included. No idea on how the output compares to yours, but it's something you may want to look at.

-Peff