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Re: Manuals


On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 08:57:44AM +0200, Bob Kruit wrote:
>    
>    I have one remark on the site. It's about the manuals. They are only
>    avalible in HTML. It would it easy if they were also avalible in PDF.
>    This makes printing them a lot easier.

Please don't send mail in HTML to this list.

You can easily generate a PDF version of the manuals; download the
source tree and configure it, run 'make dvi' in the gcc subdirectory,
then convert the .dvi files with dvipdf.  Or you can figure out the
appropriate commands and use pdftex.  Or generate the .dvi files and
print them directly, if your printer drivers can handle them.  Note
that the longest manual ("Using and Porting GCC") is 500 pages or so.

You can also order nicely printed and bound manuals from the Free
Software Foundation, but I don't know how old they are.

Maybe we should add a 'make pdf' target to the Makefiles.

As for putting pre-generated PDFs on the website, I think the major
issue would be file size.  gcc.pdf as rendered by pdftex is 2.5MB; as
rendered by plain TeX and then dvipdf, 2.6MB.  That's the biggest
manual, of course.  I don't know what the website disk space situation
is like.  If anyone has a clue how to make texinfo.tex use the fonts
that are built into PDF readers, instead of Computer Modern, that
would shrink 'em quite a bit.

It could be useful to have an automated process running 'make dvi' -
judging by the sheer number of bad \hbox warnings that scrolled by on
my screen, no one's bothered to do that in a long, long time.

For online viewing of PDFs we would probably want to figure out how to
rearrange the file so the table of contents comes at the beginning,
not the end.  (For printing, it doesn't matter, because you can sort
the pages by hand.)

-- 
zw     Breeding replacement security officers on farms where giant robot
       combine harvesters operate would tend to increase the evolutionary
       selection pressure, which may be the desired effect.
       	-- David G. Bell


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