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 The trouble is, they rapidly go out of date.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.)

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 The trouble is, they rapidly go out of date.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.

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

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 The trouble is, they rapidly go out of date.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.)

You could probably make Ddoc output to latex and then compile that into pdf.

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

If you are interested in a more elaborate solution than a simple html2pdf script take a look at the system developed for the FreeBSD project. Documentation (books, articles, the website, etc.) is written in DocBook format (SGML) and html, text, pdf, etc, versions are generated from it. It works really well.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/index.html

http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/

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.)

I have made very good experiences with tbook.

- Tags are similar to LaTeX commands. If you know LaTeX
  you get into it faster.
- It's not not so burden as docbook (tbook 80 tags - docbook ~400 tags).
- The PDF output via LaTeX is IMHO excellent and could be customized.
- Many output formats. I use it to create PDF and HTMLHelp (via docbook) from one source.
- It is available for Windows and Linux.

See
http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/
for more details.

Klaus

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> 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.
> 

hear hear!!

BA

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:

> 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.

Much earlier I posted a script to generate a PDF version of the HTML
using HTML Tidy and HtmlDoc, not sure if it still works but you might
want to have a look at: http://www.algonet.se/~afb/d/SPECIFICATION.zip

It did look a little like a web page that had been printed to PDF... :-)

--anders

At 29 Nov 2006 11:46:23 -0800 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.)

Btw, why don't you put the Ddoc files into the public?
For some purposes like automatic manipulation or conversion of
the manual, Ddoc version will be more handy than the html version.

(At least for me, doing Japanese translation of the manual,
it'll be much more helpful! :) )

-- 
Kazuhiro Inaba

Lars Ivar Igesund schrieb:
> 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. 
> 

This is almost what i intended to do by making DDoc spit out (custom) XML for me. But since DDoc allows for HTML Tags to be included in the documentation i couldn't get it working without additional tools, and thats the point where i left...