Ant user manual in printable form

Looking for the manual to ant 1.5? Look over here. This only covers the manuals from ant 1.4 and 1.3 (versions that are ancient by now).

What and Why

This page contains links to pdf and postscript versions of the user manual for ant, the java-based automated build system. The original user manual is a frames based document with each command on its own page. While that may be very convenient for quick online browsing and reference, it's not so great for printing. I decided to make a perl script that would turn the current manual into PDF files.

I had just about finished up reformatting the 1.3 documentation for printing when ant 1.4 was released, so I thought I'd go the extra little bit to get both the 1.3 and 1.4 docs in printable form. I think I have it now, with the exception that the Ant javadoc included in the 1.4 manual isn't part of the printed version. The postscript and PDF files are for US letter-sized paper, but they don't contain anything near the edge of the page and so should print just fine on A4-sized paper as well.

No, I don't have the manual for ant 1.5 yet. I need to tweak my perl script for the new format. I'm never going to get around to ant 1.5 in all likelihood. Fortunately, someone else already took care of that.

VersionhtmlPDFps.gz
1.3 jakarta-ant-manual-1.3.html jakarta-ant-manual-1.3.pdf jakarta-ant-manual-1.3.ps.gz
1.4 jakarta-ant-manual-1.4.html jakarta-ant-manual-1.4.pdf jakarta-ant-manual-1.4.ps.gz

How

The files were last regenerated sometime around the time given by this webserver's Last-Modified header. (rsync - gotta love it) To regenerate the files, I use cvs checkouts of the jakarta-ant/docs directory (versions 1.3 and 1.4 use the sticky tags ANT_13 and ANT_14, respectively; the cvs current version is just an ordinary checkout) with a few of my own modifications - mostly, these are corrections to files to preserve intra-manual links. Diffs (in -u format) are available (for 1.3, 1.4 ).

The bulk of the work was generating the huge combined html files. That's done by this perl script; to generate the postscript files I use html2ps, and I generate the pdf files with AFPL Ghostscript. I pull it all together in this shell script, using this html2ps configuration file.

Todo


Daniel Martin
Last modified: Wed Aug 7 21:10:48 CDT 2002