PDF exports of the documentation

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 22/07/15 17:10, Simon Steinbeiß wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 03:09:56 +0300
> Pasi Lallinaho <pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> inspired and motivated by a G+ thread [1] brought to my attention, I
>> decided to look again at producing PDF's out of the documentation.
>>
>> As a consequence, the Wily documentation branch [2] is now able to build
>> PDF documentation files for the documentation - and all of its
>> translations! (Makefile experts, feel free to correct my mistakes!)
>>
>> The stylesheet for the PDF is still pretty bare - I've only fixed things
>> that were outright wrong or very ugly. That said, if you are interested
>> in making the PDF version better, get in touch via replying this email
>> or ping me on IRC [3]. Most of the work now at this point will
>> (unfortunately?) require understanding or learning of Docbook and XSLT
>> stylesheets, so be prepared for that kind of hacking.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Pasi
>>
>> [1] https://plus.google.com/+RobertStreeter/posts/Emw3zcgwK9S
>> [2] https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-doc/xubuntu-docs/wily
>> [3] knome on #xubuntu-devel (and more) on Freenode
> Hey Pasi,
>
> this is really really great! I guess we could consider making these docs available on the ISO somehow, or are there any caveats?
>
> Cheers
> Simon
>
One of the discussions to be had is the document paper size discussion,
which we more or less had on #xubuntu-devel.

For those who didn't follow the discsusion, it boils down to whether we
want to maintain a manual list of languages and their preferred paper
size targets (should language X have A4 and/or US letter versions?).

As for real caveats, I don't think there are any (yet). As long as we
make sure the build requirements (fop) are installed on the build
system, we can automate the process and ship the files. Once we do this,
we better modify the documentation to link to the PDF's as well. (And I
guess we would need some magic here to only link to paper sizes that exist.)

At some point, overall weight might become something we might want to
reconsider; each PDF weighs about 370 kB (with the current setup in the
current form - this WILL change, and it can go up or down) and if each
language brings in two of those, we will be in several megs soon. I
acknowledge this isn't really a problem with our current size (and size
target), but here it is said anyway.

Finally, we likely want to make the PDFs available online as well. If we
want special treatment for them, for example a single list of all PDFs
in all languages and paper sizes, we will need some more code. This
obviously has nothing to do with making these available on the ISO.

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of the Shimmer Project         » http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member, Xubuntu Website lead   » http://xubuntu.org/