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

From: "Michael J Gruber" <redacted>

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 20.03.2015 23:38:

quoted

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Thomas referencing reading the man page offline, made me wonder
why you wouldn't read the man pages itself as they can also be
carried around offline. But the striking point is "on an iPad", 
which
doesn't offer you the convenience of a shell etc, but pdf is fine to 
read
there. Also you can add comments to pdfs more easily that html pages
I'd guess.

So the patch makes sense to me now. It's just a use case I'm 
personally
not interested in for now, but I don't oppose it as is.

Well, my comment was not about opposing to it, but was about
questioning the usefulness of it, iow, who would
benefit from having this patch in my tree?

I didn't see (and I still do not quite see) why people would want to
have separate pdf files for all the subcommands (instead of say an
.epub or .pdf that binds all the man pages and perhaps user-manual,
just like we do for .texi/.info).

Exactly. For PDF, a combined document is more natural and will 
hopefully
make crosslinks work as crossrefs within one document, rather than 
links
to external documents. I'd say that would make a valuable target.

As per the original request, it is useful to some, and the usefulness of 
a very large pdf containing all the documentation shouldn't be a reason 
to not have such a 'one at a time' target available (though personally I 
would suggest that it is the users responsibility to 'make' such a 
target, not the maintainers!).

The single large pdf has also been discussed 
(http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/207151/focus=207165) 
but didn't get into the code base either.

The user-manual is available as a pdf target.

Philip