|
|
The story of a printable Ant manual
When I first came across Ant I was amazed that the documentation did not include a PDF manual. I like to print off large volumes of documents, read them on the train, mark them up, etc etc. I am not alone. So I resolved to make a PDF version available. I have converted the Ant manual of the time to LaTeX. From this form, PDF and HTML are obtainable.
| The Ant manual as a PDF, created from the DVI output of LaTeX. | compressed with bzip2 | compressed with gzip |
| The Ant manual as a tarball of HTML, generated using latex2html. | compressed with bzip2 | compressed with gzip |
| The Ant manual LaTeX source as one file. | Ant manual LaTeX source | Ant manual LaTeX source gzip'd |
A printable Ant manual is popular
In the fullness of time I also planned to make a DocBook version available. I contacted the Ant community and discussed what I had done and that there is a need to provide printable versions of the manual. This suggestion was completely rejected. This rejection was expressed so strongly that it has put me off the idea of ever broaching the subject again with Ant developers.
I am not alone. Others have also felt the need to ensure that printable versions of the Ant manual are available. Mine seems to be the most up to date (1.5) but it is not bang up to date and inevitably it will become more and more out of date. If you want this situation to change please discuss it with the Ant Developers. I hope you have more luck than I did.
In the meantime I am pleased to see that my Ant documentation is one of the main attractions of my web site.
|