online.org (2458B)
1 I spend an inordinate amount of time making reference manuals 2 available as local files, to avoid having to reach for the web. 3 Motivations: 4 5 - exploration feels faster: completion, search & load can take seconds 6 over HTTP; 7 8 - narrowing interfaces down to a handful of tools (info, man, grep) 9 feels smoother, vs contending with every ecosystem's documentation 10 frameworks & styles. 11 12 Fuss budget varies depending on the ecosystem. Recording my 13 peregrinations here; named this note =online= for the pun, as 14 explained by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page#History][Wikipedia]]: 15 16 #+begin_quote 17 Man pages are often referred to as an /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki/Online][online]]/ form of software 18 documentation,[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page#cite_note-online-man-1][¹]] even though the =man= command does not require 19 internet access because man pages are available at a teletype line 20 terminal when it is online. 21 #+end_quote 22 # SNAFU: that ¹ note should be ^{[[…][[1]]]}, but pandoc fails to recognize 23 # (a) link descriptions with closing brackets: 24 # $ pandoc -f org <<< '[[http://perdu.com][[DESC]]]' 25 # <p><a href="http://perdu.com">[DESC</a>]</p> 26 # (b) superscripts after punctuation: 27 # $ pandoc -f org <<< 'a,^{[[http://perdu.com][DESC]]}' 28 # <p>a,^{<a href="http://perdu.com">DESC</a>}</p> 29 * IETF RFCs 30 Debian's doc-rfc metapackage installs documents built from 31 <https://www.rfc-editor.org/retrieve/rsync/>. Each RFC is available 32 as a compressed text file, along with some JSON metadata (e.g. status, 33 keywords). 34 35 So OT1H there is a wealth of information installed locally, OTOH there 36 is some inertia to browsing it: no naive grep because of compression; 37 no keyword indexation… 38 * POSIX 39 opengroup.org provides [[https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/download/index.html][archives]] of the online HTML version. I am 40 intrigued by [[https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/help/about.html][the mention of "troff sources"]]; cannot seem to find them 41 anywhere… 42 * Python 43 Debian's python3-doc package installs HTML & info versions of Python's 44 online manuals. The info version is well-indexed; however it includes 45 some cross-reference artifacts: 46 47 - "see the see =Foobar=. section." (emacs) 48 - "see the =*note Foobar=: HEX. section." (info) 49 * XDG 50 <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs> contains the DocBook 51 sources for each spec. =docbook= ∈ ~pandoc --list-input-formats~.