Is there any interest in having an epub version of the Darktable manual? This is something I might work on.
The currently available PDF manual can be converted to epub with existing software but then you end up with a single 400 miles long epub page, coming from only one section0001.xhtml. Navigation from here to there, inside that one giant page is frustrating.
From the HTML manual each individual page, like /install/index.html could be converted into the expected *.xhtml format with a script, for each such page, and then imported into sigil, and the made available as a single darktable.epub file–that displays many separate, individual sub-pages.
Users could view that file on a phone or on a desktop browser.
I might do this for my own reasons. I’m just curious if it’s something anybody else would be interested in.
=========== FWIW I have software that displays epub3 files on the server too, which has long-range implications, because server-side epub streaming makes it possible to embed live video inside the epub.
That, I think, is the future of online instruction: marrying youtube to epub, so ebooks can contain embedded video, so the user doesn’t have to multitask tab switching between the written manual in one tab with a live how-to-do-it video in another tab.
I would be interested! I am forever referencing the dt manual, so it would be extremely handy to have it on my Kindle where I could read and reread at my leasure…
I’m willing to do this. I’ve done it before. It will end up as several days work to write debug and test a script. I can and already have obtained an HTML version of the manual, on my development machine, with wget -r
Ah. I see the HTML manual sources are available at github. I’ll try to work this into my act.
Take a look at the manual source, I believe it is written in docbook, which you should be able to convert directly to epub with the docbook tools. I’ll try and take a look today.
Some time ago we discussed the darktable manual. When we already look into that we should pick that up. The first idea was to use something easier to maintain and switch to restructured text. Then look into the tool which can process RST and check what can produce nice output formats like PDF, HTML and other formats.
I guess sphinx would be the tool to use. It would also be great to have a seperate repo for that so fixes could be done also for released versions and directly updated.
I can make an epub from the PDF now but it makes a single Gondwanaland file, where it takes all day and sore a sore index finger to scroll from the end all the way back to the beginning again.
I’ll look at the sources too. What I hope to achieve is an epub that has a separate *.xhtml page for each *.html page that appears in the online manual.
Maintaining a manual as an epub with Sigil might be worth considering. Sigil’s sources can be kept in github too. And they can be exported directly as HTML with a mouse click.
The idea of XML as an authoring format is that it is single sourced, meaning from the source XML files, one can generate a variety of different outputs.
I agree that if we want en epub output (and I think it would be nice) this should be done directly from the doc sources in the repository. So if one can provide the necessary patch to add a cmake code to do that it would be nice.