Trying to read the PDF manuals on a small phone screen sucks.
Would anyone else be interested in a responsive HTML version of the Elektron manuals?
A few things to consider:
- Rotate your phone into landscape mode and it is much easier to read manuals with vertical scrolling instead of V+H scrolling
- PDF parsing in general is a hard problem because PDF is an encapsulation of PostScript, which is Turing-complete.
- HOWEVER, for a particular document / process, you may be able to build a special case parser that will work until something changes in Elektron’s documentation toolchain.
- If you intended to do this manually, use it as a portfolio piece to land a tech writer / doc ops job that pays well
- Your intentions seem pure, but it is difficult to see this as anything other than a great gift to SEO spammers.
- You can get a budget 27" monitor for under USD$150. Add a small Raspberry Pi and a mouse and keyboard you already have and you can have a dedicated document reader for ~USD$200
- I’m sad that Letter / A4 size eInk displays don’t sell in the volume that 6" eInk readers do and thus are still too expensive to spam across my office.
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And another thing …
The manuals are copyrighted, so publishing your own html-ized version is technically not allowed. Elektron might turn a blind eye, but they might not.
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