''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?)

== Implementation ==

The proposal has been mostly implemented, though neither inter-page links nor images have been dealt with.

This is an example run:
{{{
$ trunk/django/bin/django-admin.py htmldocs trunk/docs foo
Writing 'foo/add_ons.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/admin_css.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/apache_auth.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/api_stability.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/authentication.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/cache.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/contenttypes.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/contributing.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/csrf.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/custom_model_fields.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/databases.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/databrowse.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/db-api.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/design_philosophies.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/distributions.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/django-admin.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/documentation.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/email.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/faq.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/fastcgi.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/flatpages.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/form_for_model.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/form_preview.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/form_wizard.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/forms.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/generic_views.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/i18n.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/install.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/legacy_databases.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/localflavor.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/middleware.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/model-api.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/modelforms.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/modpython.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/newforms.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/outputting_csv.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/outputting_pdf.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/overview.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/pagination.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/redirects.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/release_notes_0.95.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/release_notes_0.96.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/request_response.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/serialization.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/sessions.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/settings.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/shortcuts.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/sitemaps.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/sites.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/static_files.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/syndication_feeds.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/templates.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/templates_python.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/testing.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/transactions.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/tutorial01.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/tutorial02.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/tutorial03.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/tutorial04.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/unicode.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/url_dispatch.html'...  done
Writing 'foo/webdesign.html'...  done
Writing index...  done
All done
}}}

A page from multi-page output looks like this:

[[Image(Screenshot.png)]]

The single-page output looks like this:

[[Image(Screenshot_single.png)]]