Downloadable User Manual

[Bill Richards]

Nearly all of my imaging sessions are done in remote locations with no Internet access. The on-line user manual is great, but I really, REALLY need the ability to access it in the field. Is there any possibility that the current user manual can be exported to a PDF file and made available for download?

If that’s already been done, I apologize as I was unable to locate it.

[Grant Fribbens]

You can clone the same documentation that is on the website from the Bitbucket repo https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina.docs/src/master/

Read the CONTRIBUTING.md file and run the commands under the prerequisites section and then you can run mkdoc serve and you can then read the documentation via the url of http://localhost:8000

[Bill Richards]

If I’m interpreting the prerequisites correctly, I would python installed on my laptop as well as mkdocs. My laptop is a small, lightweight model that I use only for astrophotography - I don’t have space to load a huge python environment on my SSD just to read a user’s manual. Why can’t it just me made available in a convenient and lightweight format like PDF?

[Dale Ghent]

There have been some unsatisfactory results when rendering a PDF from the documentation source. Finding a way to rectify that and get a more pleasant and useful result has been on the list of things to do. Some investigation is involved.

[Stefan B]

You can use the command “mkdocs build” to build the documentation and transport it to another pc.

An export to PDF has been looked at, but the available plugins don’t work well and produce a bad result. The alternative could be to make the built docs available as a zip download, however the documentation is changing occasionally so your copy can get outdated quickly.

[Stanley Dimant]

So I just tried it out and you can use WinHTTrack (Download here: http://www.httrack.com/page/2/) to download the whole documentation page by pointing it to https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/develop/site/ or https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/master/site/

I didn’t see any issues with that and it can just be navigated normally. Keep in mind to regularly update the local docs however.

[Bill Richards]

Stanley, thanks for the pointer. That worked - took a while, but it worked.

Although it still consumes a lot more space than a PDF file would.

[Stanley Dimant]

Glad it worked. The site downloaded takes me 22mb which is really insignificant. A PDF wouldn't necessarily be smaller since most of the size (if I'm not mistaken about 21mb) comes from images, which wouldn't be smaller in a PDF file either.

[Stefan B]

For nightlies the pdf will now be available at:

https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/develop/site/pdf/Manual.pdf