In the FAQ, it is said: "Although we currently only have an online version, other formats are being developed, such as PDF versions. If we created PDFs for every architecture and option, we would have to provide numerous PDFs of which only a few sections differ. Talk about a waste of resources :)." Why don't you put the manual sources (XML format or anything else) on the web, and explain the user how to obtain the format he wants? i.e. if you don't wan't to make the PDF by yourself, why don't you provide the user with means to make it by himself... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
The XML format *is* the source of all documents and is available online. You can add ?passthru=1 to any .xml url to get the untransformed xml, you can browse our CVS (link on home page) or you can download snapshots per language of all files under /doc from http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/doc-snapshots/ If you want to transform the xml into anything but html, you're on your own, but feel free to contribute any transform you might cook up if you think it could be of any value to the Gentoo community.
Firstly, thanks for responding quickly. Ok, by the way, I can get the XML sources of the manuals. But how do you get PDF from them ? It is possible because an english PDF version of the handbook is available in the first 2005.0 Gentoo CDROM. Then, my question is: How do Gentoo developers obtain this PDF from the XML files ? I think it would be great for non-english speaking users to be able to get the PDF version of the manual by themselves...
Why "by themselves"? Why not generate the PDF docs in the similar way as the HTML docs? If the PDF version of 2005.0 is really included on the CDs, there *are* some XSLT stylesheets (or other means of conversion tools) available. Or would it put too big pressure to the webserver? I'm not familiar with gorg's caching system...
It's indeed too difficult; generating the PDFs stresses the system quite a lot and needs tools that aren't available on our webservers (due to security, maintenance and stability reasons). Having the docdevs generate the PDFs themselves every time the handbook is updated is also a no-go.
