From: Philip Oakley Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 23:06:05 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Documentation: Add target to build PDF manpages Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <55103565.9040000@drmicha.warpmail.net> From: "Michael J Gruber" > Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 20.03.2015 23:38: >> Stefan Beller writes: >> >>> Thomas referencing reading the man page offline, made me wonder >>> why you wouldn't read the man pages itself as they can also be >>> carried around offline. But the striking point is "on an iPad", >>> which >>> doesn't offer you the convenience of a shell etc, but pdf is fine to >>> read >>> there. Also you can add comments to pdfs more easily that html pages >>> I'd guess. >>> >>> So the patch makes sense to me now. It's just a use case I'm >>> personally >>> not interested in for now, but I don't oppose it as is. >> >> Well, my comment was not about opposing to it, but was about >> questioning the usefulness of it, iow, who would >> benefit from having this patch in my tree? >> >> I didn't see (and I still do not quite see) why people would want to >> have separate pdf files for all the subcommands (instead of say an >> .epub or .pdf that binds all the man pages and perhaps user-manual, >> just like we do for .texi/.info). > > Exactly. For PDF, a combined document is more natural and will > hopefully > make crosslinks work as crossrefs within one document, rather than > links > to external documents. I'd say that would make a valuable target. As per the original request, it is useful to some, and the usefulness of a very large pdf containing all the documentation shouldn't be a reason to not have such a 'one at a time' target available (though personally I would suggest that it is the users responsibility to 'make' such a target, not the maintainers!). The single large pdf has also been discussed (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/207151/focus=207165) but didn't get into the code base either. The user-manual is available as a pdf target. Philip