Some manuals include technical details, to encourage contributors. It would be very helpful if it were possible to export to PDF, since that would enable printing out specific pages for reference.
All KDE documentation in English and almost all translations (except for CJK languages) are available through http://docs.kde.org/ This documentation in PDF format is updated once a week (on Fridays). Do you mean that KHelpCenter should provide links to them or make them visible in another way (distribution packages, something else...)?
I wasn't aware of that although I had heard you speak of creating PDFs. At the moment the Help link always takes you to the docbook manuals, so I wonder if there is any way we could get a link to the PDFs as alternatives? Is this something that depends entirely on the project team?
I've just opened http://docs.kde.org/ - how do you get the PDFs? If the information is there but I'm not seeing it, that suggests that it needs to be more prominent.
(In reply to comment #3) > I've just opened http://docs.kde.org/ - how do you get the PDFs? If the > information is there but I'm not seeing it, that suggests that it needs to > be more prominent. 1. Choose module on the left pane (e.g. kdeedu). 2. Click on "(PDF)" next to the application name (e.g. KLettres).
Thanks. In this case I wanted the Tellico manual, so I followed this instruction behaving as I guessed most users would. Tellico isn't on the list. Using search brings up the docbook manual. The only thing left is for the user to list the contents of each package as it appears in the list. Tellico is in the very last package and I have to wonder whether joe-user would have continued to the end. This is very user-unfriendly, and what's more, negates the efforts put in to produce the PDF.Atm I can't see any easier way to do it here. Probably the easiest thing would be for developers to put a PDF link into the Help menu in their projects, but I don't know how best to lobby for this.
You want to lobby for: * A link to a PDF that contains exactly the same information the docbook does * A link to a PDF that only is available if you are connected to the internet What's the benefit of that lobbying?
The benefit is that those of us that are connected to the internet at least would be able to print out, if they wish, chapters of the manual that are required for reference/study. At the moment there doesn't seem any easily found way to do that. Please accept that for some of us, dead trees are not entirely useless. The alternative is to find some way to let the docbook manual be printable - and I'm assuming that that's difficult or it would have been done.
Adding printing to KHelpCenter is probably a trivial thing to do given it uses KHTML for the rendering and KHTML can print. Probably a few days of work for someone with no previous KDE coding knowledge and a few hours for someone with it. You just need to find someone with the available amount of time :-)
Burkhard printing was disabled on commit https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-runtime/repository/revisions/424259b96679c788fcc3886820d19b6b6a757bad/diff/khelpcenter/mainwindow.cpp by David Stephen Hubner and the commit log is "Hide Search functionality.. and other things, requested by Burkhard Lück" Any reason why you asked him to remove the Print feature? I just uncommented 2 lines and got it working fine
(In reply to comment #9) > Burkhard printing was disabled on commit > https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-runtime/repository/revisions/ > 424259b96679c788fcc3886820d19b6b6a757bad/diff/khelpcenter/mainwindow.cpp by > David Stephen Hubner and the commit log is > "Hide Search functionality.. and other things, requested by Burkhard Lück" > > Any reason why you asked him to remove the Print feature? > The Print action (File->Print Frame) was an always disabled menu item. I have just verified that in VMs with KDE 4.4.2 + 4.5.1, printing is not possible. So I asked David Hubner to remove the always disabled print action or make it work. Quoting his answer: Am Dienstag, 27. Juli 2010, 23:00:14 David Hubner: > On 23/07/10 10:25, Burkhard Lück wrote: [snip> > > > * printing is an disabled action, so it should be either removed oder > > better made working. Nice would be to download the pdf's from > > docs.kde.org and print them. > > Done, i have removed it. There was no printing support at all. > [snip]
Wow! Just confirmed that I can print a chapter from the docs.kde.org manual. Can I take it that future releases will have that enabled in the bundled docs? This is a real advantage, so thanks for the speedy work :-)
Git commit 698d54213d3ecd6b1564e6792f5626442f29c042 by Albert Astals Cid. Committed on 19/03/2012 at 20:53. Pushed by aacid into branch 'KDE/4.8'. Make printing work (i.e. uncomment the code) FIXED-IN: 4.8.2 M +1 -6 khelpcenter/khelpcenterui.rc M +1 -1 khelpcenter/mainwindow.cpp http://commits.kde.org/kde-runtime/698d54213d3ecd6b1564e6792f5626442f29c042
Git commit f6e65492947737661cd4f0f018d1b49d71c4edf2 by Albert Astals Cid. Committed on 19/03/2012 at 20:53. Pushed by aacid into branch 'master'. Make printing work (i.e. uncomment the code) FIXED-IN: 4.8.2 (cherry picked from commit 698d54213d3ecd6b1564e6792f5626442f29c042) M +1 -6 khelpcenter/khelpcenterui.rc M +1 -1 khelpcenter/mainwindow.cpp http://commits.kde.org/kde-runtime/f6e65492947737661cd4f0f018d1b49d71c4edf2
Wonderful! Thanks again for your help.