This page details the PDF build of the boost documentation.

SVN commit ​51104 to trunk provides the basic support: improved fo.xsl stylesheet, tweaked individual Jamfiles so they find their images etc when being built as a PDF, and adds doc/pdf/Jamfile.v2 to build all boost libraries that can be as individual PDF's.

Beta builds of the PDF's are available from ​http://boost.cowic.de/rc/pdf/

The following default build options have been added to the fo.xsl stylesheet customisation layer:

• No indent on body text (we need all the horrizontal space we can get for code blocks).
• Left and right page margins 0.5in - a little small, but as above we need all the space we can get.
• Paper type is A4 - it's an ISO standard, and just a little smaller than US letter, so should print OK on both.
• Draft mode is turned off so we don't go after draft.png just in case.
• SVG graphics are used for admonishments.
• Default path to search for images (if not overridden in a library's Jamfile) is the SVN repository.

TODO's

• Some of the PDF's are badly named: for example the python tutorial is simply "tutorial.pdf", Phoenix is "users_manual.pdf" and Boost.Build is "standalone.pdf".
• The libraries Conversion, Optional and Thread do not currently build as PDF's - their XML is invalid, looks like an easy fix though - just tweak their usage of hyperlinks at global (ie not in a section) scope.
• The BoostBook documentation doesn't build as a PDF: Lots of inval XML, this one looks much harder to fix.
• Currently only RenderX's XEP FO processor will build all the docs correctly, Apache FOP is *still* not mature enough :-(
• There is currently no way to detect overflow of content on the right margin (usually caused by over-long code blocks), ideally this would be made a build error.