PDF version of D manuals

Lars Ivar Igesund larsivar at igesund.net
Wed Nov 29 12:24:36 PST 2006


Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:

> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> I've been taking some heat lately about the D web site not making
>> available a PDF version of the D manual that can be downloaded, printed,
>> and read offline.
>> 
>> I know some people have made PDFs of the manual before. The trouble is,
>> they rapidly go out of date.
>> 
>> So I'm interested in if anyone can recommend a tool that can take text
>> and convert it to PDFs. I'm not interested in a tool with a gui
>> interface, I want one that can be driven from a script, so this can be
>> done automatically with each new release.
>> 
>> (The html version of the manual is currently created automatically using
>> a script from Ddoc text files. Such has really cut the workload of
>> maintaining a common look/feel of the site.)
> 
> htmldoc should be able to do what you want. If started without any
> arguments, it pops up a gui, but it should be no problem to script it.
> 
> http://www.htmldoc.org
> 
> It should be easily available for your Linux distribution, seems to be
> more troublesome to find a free Windows download.
> 

A solution that would be more troublesome to implement at first, but that
would be more powerful later (and for the D community at large), is to make
it possible for DDoc to output DocBook XML (see http://www.docbook.org ),
which through some careful transformations can be transformed to any format
you like (for X/HTML, just XSL transformations are necessary, using XSL
transformations + a XSL-FO processor like FOP
(http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop), almost any format can be produced,
including PDF), and all from the same XML sources.

If someone would like to go this route, I might be able to give further
tips, I'm setting up a similar process where I'm currently working. 

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource & #D: larsivi



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