Aw: Re: Re: [PATCH] Remove pdf target from Makefiles

Aw: Re: Re: [PATCH] Remove pdf target from Makefiles

[Thomas Ackermann]

> 
> If I understood the original commit message correctly, you were saying
> the XML file was not suitable for html generation and you wanted to
> tweak it, and were dropping the PDF target to avoid breaking it.  Now
> if I understand correctly you are saying the XML file actually *is*
> suitable for html generation, and that the html generation rules just
> need tweaking.  In that case, why remove the PDF target?
> 
The latter is correct ;-)
In my commit message I talked about style files meaning
/etc/asciidoc/dblatex/asciidoc-dblatex.xsl and /etc/asciidoc/dblatex/asciidoc-dblatex.sty
which are used when creating user-manual.pdf out of user-manual.xml
and ./Documentation/docbook.xsl which is used for creating user-manual.html
out of user-manual.xml.
When I want to tweak the html generation rules I also have to tweak the pdf
generation rules because html and pdf should be as similiar to each other as
possible. But the pdf rules are global rules so we have to introduce rules
local to git and also tweak both rule sets in parallel.
I asked myself "Is this really worth the effort or should we drop user-manual.pdf 
and spend our efforts better on user-manual.txt and user-manual.html?"
and so came up with this patch ...


---
Thomas

Re: Re: Re: [PATCH] Remove pdf target from Makefiles

[Jonathan Nieder]

Thomas Ackermann wrote:

> When I want to tweak the html generation rules I also have to tweak the pdf
> generation rules because html and pdf should be as similiar to each other as
> possible.

Ah, *that's* what I missed.  Thanks for explaining.

I think it's fine for the html and pdf to look different.  After all,
a better way to get an exact rendering of the HTML as a PDF would be
to convert from HTML to PDF (or to print from a browser).  I always
assumed the point of the PDF was to look better on paper than the
HTML, so as long as you're not changing the source document in some
way that breaks the PDF, I don't see any harm in it.

Thanks again and hope that helps,
Jonathan