Re: [PATCH] Documentation: Add target to build PDF manpages

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Mar 20, 2015, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <3037A3ADECA54FB2B56348E4F6F04A95@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4mpfe7xm.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>

Show 10 quoted lines

> Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:
>
>> ... though how would I read man pages in pdf
>> format? I tried searching the web and all I can find is how
>> to convert the a man page to pdf. So is there a conveniant
>> way to tell `man` to prefer opening pdfs when available?
>
> I presume that "man -Tpdf git.1" is not what you are looking for, as
> that would literally be how you get the manpages in PDF format?
>

I'd expect 'git help --pdf git' to simply feed the path of git.pdf (probably in the same directory as the .html versions) to the web browser and let it determine the users prefered reader.

Show 6 quoted lines

> Personally, I honestly am not quite sure why anybody wants to
> generate manpages in the PDF format like this patch does, unless
> they are planning to print them on paper, in which case the existing
> manpages (git.1 and friends) or html pages (git.html and friends)
> should be an already available source format.
> --

Despite the scare stories and problems that pdf format can bring it is quite popular as a way of 'freezing' what is displayed (I use it a lot to capture web confirmations;-), so I don't see it as being too outlandish, though I wouldn't expect the project to automatically generate the pdfs in the same way the man and web pages are.

-- Philip