''Part of DjangoSpecifications''

= Producing HTML and PDF output from `docs` source =

This is useful for both offline documentation '''and''' reading branch documentation that is usually not available on the web.

#528 is a long-standing ticket that has a basic implementation. A better (perhaps?) approach is proposed below.

== Proposal ==

Generating offline documentation should work as follows:
 * there is a command '''builddocs''' that can be called from either `django-admin.py` or `manage.py`
  * that produces multiple-page HTML output from the docs by default, but accepts the option `--single` to produce single-page output
  * PDF generation is less important, but should be implemented eventually, see http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf (rather than pisa from http://www.htmltopdf.org/ as proposed in #528/#6443)
 * the converter tries to make the documentation look similar to web docs by
   * using (a subset of) the Django official CSS http://media.djangoproject.com/css/homepage.css (discuss copyright issues)
   * using the customized docutils classes from source:djangoproject.com/django_website/apps/docs/builder.py
 * the inter-page links should be converted to make them work properly (by extending the docutils classes)
 * less important: external images from http://media.djangoproject.com/img/doc/ can be retrieved and image links converted accordingly (`--with-images` option perhaps?)