From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 22:12:39 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Documentation: Add target to build PDF manpages
Message-ID: <3037A3ADECA54FB2B56348E4F6F04A95@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4mpfe7xm.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

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

> 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