Publish API documentation as ebook [#1257866]

I think it would be great to have the Drupal API documentation as an ebook to study while away from my computer. One book per major version would make sense, I think. ePub and Kindle (Mobi) are probably the most important ebook formats to offer, but for findability and reference, here's a (more or less) complete list of those that people are likely to be searching for or interested in having:

Interestingly, MySQL (who I've always felt did a good job in this arena) offers their reference manuals as an Eclipse Doc plugin, man pages, and RPM. PHP offers their (also excellent) documentation as a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file, as well.

Comments

Comment #1

hejazee CreditAttribution: hejazee commented 24 August 2011 at 18:22

Comment #2

gwences CreditAttribution: gwences commented 26 October 2011 at 14:54

there is any form of downloadable compiled docs?

Comment #3

jhodgdon

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CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented 28 February 2013 at 21:57

Project:	Drupal.org site moderators	» API
Version:		» 7.x-1.x-dev
Component:	API.drupal.org	» Other

Moving to API project for consideration as new module feature

Comment #3.0

jhodgdon

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CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented 28 February 2013 at 21:57

Issue summary:

View changes

Added a list of other ebook formats for findability and reference.

Comment #4

jhodgdon

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CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented 14 November 2013 at 05:53

The best thing to do would probably be to output the API docs into AsciiDoc or DocBook format, which could then be converted to many different formats for output. In fact, we've already been exploring how to convert AsciiDoc into DocBook and from that to other formats on this other issue:
#2106873: [meta][policy, no patch] Make Drupal 8 developer docs more discoverable
It's quite feasible and the output is good.

The difficulties here would be:
a) The API module is very HTML oriented right now. But there might be some existing classes/functions for doing an HTML to DocBook or AsciiDoc conversion?

b) Cross-linking. In a PDF or other e-book format, you'd want the cross-linking to be there.

c) Figuring out a reasonable order for the book. Possibly alphabetical by file (traversing the directory tree) and then alphabetically or in file order within each file? Or... functions in alphabetical order in one section, classes in namespaced alphabetical order in the next section, ... ? Not sure.

The more I think of it, the less I'm sure that a book-style reference for the Drupal API makes any sense. It lends itself best to a web site...