PDF version of D manuals

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> (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.

I've used DDoc + some xml generation rules found in this ng a year or
two ago for small projects. Then converted the xml to pdf using FOP. I
think the weakest link is the DDoc implementation. It does not always
generate valid and/or well-formed xml so I have made ad hoc filtering
rules for the "xml"-like output. Also the FOP generates separate pdf
files for every source file. I've just put them together with pdftk.

> 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. 

I would prefer adding a proper support for D syntax and semantics to
doxygen. There's not much point in reinventing the wheel again.