Nixpkgs: provide our manuals (nix, nixOS, nixOps) as pdf

[toogley]

Hey.

I've read on IRC, that our manuals (nix, nixops and nixos) do already exist as epub.

But i'd love if those manuals would also be automatically available as pdf's.

[FRidh]

See https://nixos.org/nix/download.html for the Nix manual. It includes a link to the PDF.
In the case of NixOS and Nixpkgs the direct links seem to be missing.

[toogley]

@FRidh Ah, i missed that. Is there a way to receive those pdf manuals? enabling system.build.manual.manual in configuration.nix doesn't seem to do that.

[FRidh]

Both Nixpkgs and NixOS don't seem to provide function that builds the PDF versions, but it shouldn't be hard to add that.

Nixpkgs

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/default.nix
Checkout nixpkgs, then $ nix-build -A doc. There doesn't seem to be a function for building a PDF but that should be straightforward to add.

NixOS

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/release.nix#L97
Checkout nixpkgs, then $ nix-build -A manual nixos/release.nix

[LnL7]

I knew I had seen a pdf somewhere, just couldn't find it. I was a bit surprised that we don't have it in the manual builds.

[ericsagnes]

There was a pdf manual for NixOS but it was removed in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d5756cdf0afb066af91b837856867bd8e1bc7fe0.

[toogley]

Hm, i personally like to have some kind of up-to-date offline manual - when my system breaks and i don't have internet connection, its good to have some documentation.

Furthermore, i think the reason given by @edolstra is a bit flawed, because providing the manual additionally as pdf doesn't hurt in any way (IMHO).

[FRidh]

@toogley you can nix-build the html docs yourself. That way you have them offline, and the latest version. You could even add them to your environment.systemPackages or system.extraDependencies to make sure you have them always on your system.

[ericsagnes]

On NixOS, there is always an offline version of the maual available by running the nixos-help command.

[toogley]

Okay, thanks @ericsagnes - that means, i don't need an pdf version. Thanks!

[HeinrichHartmann]

I have interest in this as well. I am trying to make up my mind if I should give NIX a shot, and want to print the manual to give it a thorough review.

• The online version does not print for me on Firefox. Safari works, but it's not exactly pretty.
• The pdf links on the download page that @FRidh mentioned have disappeared.
• I was not able to find the epub version that @toogley mentioned. Where can I find them?
• I don't have NIX/NIXOS installed so building them myself is not so easy for me.

So, it looks like pdf versions of the manual are not readily available at this point in time. I would certainly appreciate having them.

PS: Nix is great. Thanks for making this!

[HeinrichHartmann]

Update: Reading the comments again, it looks like there are no (built-in) ways to make a pdf version from NixOS, just the HTML versions. So the last bullet is not an option.