Re: [PATCH] Documentation: Add target to build PDF manpages
On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
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> 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?
Not quite as that is producing a pdf. So I could do
man -Tpdf git add >tmpfile && evince tmpfile && rm tmpfile
but that is inconvenient to type, so I'd rather be looking for
man_or_pdf_when_possible git add
and I could alias man_or_pdf_when_possible to a short name.
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>
> 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.
This is what I was wondering about as well and my conclusion was it is nicer than the output of man itself to look at, so there must be an obvious command to read pdf instead of man.
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.
Thomas Schneider
