Re: [9front] 9front Programmer's Manual

[Humm <hummsmith42@gmail.com>]

> what specific changes did you have in mind, and what is the purpose 
> of the exercise?

I had in mind either fixing and updating the means of building big 
volumes containing the documents and the man pages or removing them 
completely.

Building those big volumes probably wouldn’t actually be too useful, 
since it’s easy to read everything on-line.  It might help with 
reading stuff with, say, an e-book reader (as sirjofri mentioned), but 
even then stuff like title pages, a ToC, prefaces, and maybe even the 
permuted index wouldn’t have any purpose.

If the manual is to be printed, for whatever reason (like people 
finding it easier to read stuff on paper), as you currently do with 
one half of it, I like to have the means of building the print edition 
(a generic one, without colorful covers and custom page size 
adjustments) in the system.

As it is, we have a build system for big volumes somewhat usable for 
print, but it refers to Plan 9 4E on the title pages and in the first 
preface, doesn’t work well, and produces bad results (mix of troff 
default 8.5*11i and ms default 8*11i) without easy means to customize 
the page layout and type.  Whatever the outcome is, I don’t want to 
keep something bad like that.

Updating the documents or adding new ones is not a primary concern of 
mine here and can be done either way.

What I have done is create a working version of that, my 
/n/tcp!9p.zone!9991/humm/^(print.pdf docs) .  No big changes of 
content, just the name “9front Programmer’s Manual,” better page 
numbering, and easier control of parameters of the final result.

-- 
Humm