Re: [PATCH] Documentation: Add target to build PDF manpages

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2015-03-20 21:21 GMT+01:00 Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Stefan Beller <sbeller@xxxxxxxxxx> 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?
Make man(1) open your PDF viewer?  As far as I know, you’d have to
either patch man or write a wrapper around it.

> 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.
Somebody in the #git IRC channel, called “IIT”, asked how to get PDF
manpages, so I found out respectively mostly already knew how to and
wrote this patch.
Their usecase was “read manpages offline on an iPad and make
annotations and highlights.”  I do not know iOS and the available
apps, so making annotations to documents might indeed be cumbersome
with HTML documents, not to mention troff.  I could also imagine
making an EPUB or mobipocket file from the AsciiDoc (which is quite
easy, both formats are more or less HTML), there are of course
dedicated eBook readers, which mostly support some sort of
annotations, and I’m sure there are decent apps for iOS as well.

So, maybe most people are fine with the other formats, but those who
need PDF can directly generate them.  And those who don’t will
probably not even notice.  Fedora does not seem to include any PDFs
(find /usr/share/doc/git* -iname "*pdf") and the Gentoo ebuild doesn’t
have any hints on PDF either, I suppose most other distros are
similar.
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