Now I want a pdf for every man page on my system.
Pandoc? Some kind of bash script? Go for it, the result would be amazing.
Vim PDF Documentation
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
2567 A4 pages in my PDF viewer. Quite neat. Honest question: why PDF? From within Vim one uses :help and the internal hyperlinks. What do people here think the value added of the PDF is? I won't be printing it!
> why PDF? I wanted to ask the exact question. Nobody sits down and read it from the beginning, and without links, there is no point of a PDF.
I have read it from the beginning, and the individuals who maintain the documentation likely have as well.
What format supports interpage linking, can be displayed both electronically and is print quality, and can be read on virtually every platform?
The only print quality formats are postscript or PDF and from that only PDFs can be viewed electronically as well being print ready.
So, there does not exist a solution that is not PDF in this case, especially if other attributes are desired such as the readers not requiring a costly license to use.
I am not incredibly happy with that being the case, but there are open source readers and exporters for (most) PDFs nowadays so it is more or less a non-issue.
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#43As a Kindle owner, I don't really appreciate PDFs...
As a regular PDF reader, I don't appreciate devices that can't make it easy to read an old and common format easily.
The problem it's not the device, but the constrains of the format.
Most PDFs resemble an A4-sized sheet of paper, and downscaling it to fit the screen of a small device usually ends up in usability/readability problems.
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#44I love this, I just wish there was a way to have the font in something more readable for the areas that aren't positional format sensitive. For some reason, I can read monospaced fonts for code perfectly, but when it comes to text, I have difficulty reading it.
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is help documentation almost 3000 pages or is the source almost 3000 pages? :D
Help documentation. I am honestly a little shocked by the length, I knew the docs were exceptional, but surprised by how long they are.
This includes both the user's manual, the reference manual, and platform specific information in one file. The user's manual is a subset of the reference manual, and that is 500-600 pages long by itself. The reference manual is enormous, but that is the nature of reference manuals. What is even more shocking is how clear the reference material is despite its breadth and technical subject.
It's an excellent example of how to write quality documentation. What Vim's maintainers get, and what is often neglected in products, is that the documentation is part of the product's value and must be as high of a priority as the rest of the product. If you have had the misfortune of working with Cadence's OrCAD (or pretty much any engineering software) the value of excellent documentation being available is very apparent.
Despite OrCAD's potentially 20k+ USD cost the documentation is very scant and greatly harms its barrier to entry for user's; as a result understanding how it works require tutelage from another expert as though writing has not yet been invented and stories are still only being passed down orally.
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#46Probably would have been more helpful to link to the blog post explaining the project - http://nathangrigg.net/2013/09/reproducing-vim-help-as-a-ful... . It would be great if the top comments at least had a look at the PDF, and maybe read that blog post - the file is full of hyperlinks (that was the whole point), has a beautiful index viewable in the sidebar of Skim, and he made it because he wanted to read on his iP…
The Emacs manual is available in many formats, including PDF: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html
The Emacs documentation is excellent and among the handful of products that have documentation that approaches that of Vim's in any meaningful way, but the PDF does not have interpage links like the one in the OP does. That is not as important as it is with Vim's documentation because of how the documentation is written and because the topics are more self-contained, but it is a significant difference.
The documentation within Emacs has such links though and the topics are slightly more discoverable because the documentation can be searched without knowing its prefixes for different sections ahead of time. I have to know that some commands are organized with i_ to find some insert mode documentation for instance with Vim. They are consistent in their semantics though, but that is one gotcha for newcomers and something I did not realize initially. Without that merely doing :h won't return what the user is actually wanting the documentation for as topics shadow each other in their naming and are made distinct with the naming prefixes.
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
2567 A4 pages in my PDF viewer. Quite neat. Honest question: why PDF? From within Vim one uses :help and the internal hyperlinks. What do people here think the value added of the PDF is? I won't be printing it!
> why PDF? I wanted to ask the exact question. Nobody sits down and read it from the beginning, and without links, there is no point of a PDF.
I didn't even read the entire blog post yet, but he says right at the start that a primary motivation was wanting to be able to read through it while using his iPad.
Makes sense to me. I enjoy and find useful reading technical documentation while not sitting at a computer. Sometimes, it almost seems most productive when I read a few pages, drift off into a 10 minute nap, and then resume. Things then seem to stick better in my long term memory. (Meaning, when I'm in pure "assimilation" mode as opposed to actively working with/on/using the topic, which is also a great aid to remembering.)
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#48Now I want a pdf for every man page on my system.
If you're on a mac, try this:
man -t | open -f -a Preview
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#49I suggest playing nethack to get comfortable with VIM navigation. Helped me a lot.
I'd just like to point out, though, that in the real world "vim navigation" is not very hjkl-heavy. (Much more w, b, f, t, search, etc).
Having said that, go play nethack anyway :)
Re: Vim PDF Documentation
#50As a Kindle owner, I don't really appreciate PDFs...
As a regular PDF reader, I don't appreciate devices that can't make it easy to read an old and common format easily.
I'm totally with you. I couldn't care less about all the marvelous games you can play with each new device people stand in line for. What I'm waiting for is the perfect PDF reader for my thousands of PDF books and articles.