Richard Owlett posted on Tue, 3 Dec 2024 08:38:26 -0600 as excerpted:
> As a tri-focal wearing octogenarian I require HTML's ability to display
> a readable font. I routinely have multiple tabs open and am working
> without internet availability [low data cap also;].
>
> PDF documentation close to unusable.
>
> Are the HTML docs available for local viewing?
Yes, but it may or may not be easy and straightforward, depending...
There are, depending on how you count (some ways have multiple variants),
at least three ways, which I present as five below, to have the HTML-
format docs locally.
The easiest way if you're lucky, is that they're already installed as part
of your existing installed package, and you just have to find them to
point your browser at. (But see the caveat in the next paragraph.)
Caveat: Note that kde's native handbook format isn't (or wasn't, it might
be for 6.x) quite standard HTML and may require kde-specific browser tools
to properly view. With 5.x and earlier I believe this was more of a
problem, but I /think/ 6.x versions are closer to standard HTML, as with
6.x the handbook viewer is qtwebengine based. In any case, conversion to
standard HTML is also possible, see the "build", and "download and save"
options below.
Incrementally harder, depending on your OS and hardware platform, would be
choosing another compatible package format and installing it. For
instance, on most Linux distros you'd normally install the distro native
package, but can also choose the flatpack (general Linux distro-
independent binary package format) or snap (Ubuntu's apparently inflicted
with NIH syndrome and has its own format) package. These will take more
space than the normal native-format package because they bundle most/all
the deps and may not run as efficiently due to security sandboxing, but if
your native-format package doesn't include the handbooks this could be
your easiest way to get them, and because the install location should be
different, you should still be able to run the native-format package
version if desired. (Same caveat.)
Arguably the hardest way (for most) is to download the package sources
(and install any necessary build-time dependencies, which you might have
to build in turn if your distro-available versions aren't those required
by the build) and "build" (convert to HTML from the shipped docbook
format) and install the files (including the linked images), either as
part of building the entire package or by invoking the appropriate
commands to just process the documentation. (With this option you can
choose what you want to convert to.)
Somewhere between those two extremes are:
Downloading the files from the web and saving them locally, including both
the text and associated images. Some browsers have a save mechanism that
allows doing this with a single save method that prepackages the separate
original page text-file and linked image, css, etc, files into a single
archive, with an associated viewing method that automatically unpacks and
presents as a single page view all the separate files as if you were
viewing them on the original page, while other browsers will only save the
original page HTML file initially and you'll need to download and create
an appropriate tree for all the associated images, etc, manually.
(Obviously these are standard HTML and image files.)
The link for this, which (given you mentioned PDFs) you likely already
have, is https://docs.kde.org
Manually extracting the necessary files from a pre-built package,
presumably of a package type (like flatpack) other than the one you
normally use, and installing them to a local tree. (The document format
here depends on what the package ships.)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
