User:ABSHK/GSoC21/Abstract

Abstract for Generator for offline documentation

The current documentation for OpenSCAD is available online at WikiBooks for easy access, which also facilitates user edits for improvisation of the manual that can be contributed to by anyone. Since we only have an online version available as of now, this creates a problem for users who do not have access to the internet at all times.

With this Project, we aim to provide an ‘offline’ version of the manual which can be generated once at the time of build and contains the whole OpenSCAD User Manual along with the OpenSCAD Language Docs.

The WikiMedia Foundation currently provides a web service named MediaWiki Action API for all the Wikimedia wikis including WikiBooks. This allows easy access to many features that WikiBooks provides including the information available at the wiki. With an API-centered approach, this project aims to provide the User with an offline copy of the docs, similar to those available online at the wiki, in HTML format, which can then be easily viewed using any installed browser, along with a pdf of the same, which also is another widely used, user-friendly file format.