Re: Documentation epub format

On May 1, 2013, at 2:11 PM, "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:

>
> On 05/01/2013 10:52 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>>> Once upon a time we had multiple books as documentation, then at some
>>> point we merged them. It was quite a few years ago.
>>> I would agree at this point that we need to consider breaking them up
>>> again. The documentation is unwieldy.
>>
>> The reason we merged them was to allow hyperlink cross-references between
>> different parts of the docs. I would be sad to lose that.\
>
> Defintely. Is there no way to cross reference multiple documents?
>
> Peter?
>

The weakness (IMO) is that you are trading off one large file for several smaller ones. The documentation is unwieldily because of the depth and breadth, not the size of the file. Thinking in terms of common use cases, you would have the the published document on an offline device. For external linking you would have to assume a directory structure, or multiple files all local in the same directory, and that's assuming the various formats for doing the linking. While there is fairly broad support for link points within a document, or to an http(s) url in formats like epub and pdf. file:// uri's are far less robust in support, and it is quite hit or miss in the various readers. Other than local HTML, I cannot think of a format that has good local file/relative path support for linking multiple documents, and broad device/platform support.
Dru