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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

The first challenge for the prospective reader is building the manual itself.

  git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/c-intro-and-ref.git
  cd c-intro-and-ref
  make c.pdf

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Thanks for the instructions.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install texlive-latex-extra

sudo apt install dvipdf

sudo apt install ghostscript

sudo apt install texinfo

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/c-intro-and-ref.git

cd c-intro-and-ref

make c.pdf

makeinfo --html -v c.texi -o c.html --no-split

I ran these after creating a docker container on my mac.

> docker run -t -i -v $HOME/docker-mounted:/tmp ubuntu /bin/bash

And copy the c.pdf from /tmp in docker to my local mac.

With Docker:

  mkdir -p out.d ; chmod 1777 out.d
  docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)/out.d:/out.d" \
    debian:latest \
    sh -c "
        apt update && apt install --no-install-recommends -y \
          texlive-latex-extra \
          texlive-base \
          ghostscript \
          texinfo \
          git \
          ca-certificates \
        && git clone --depth 1 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/c-intro-and-ref.git \
        && cd c-intro-and-ref \
        && make c.pdf \
        && makeinfo --html -v c.texi -o /out.d/c.html --no-split
    "

> sudo apt install dvipdf

There's no such package.

I think the package texlive-base or texlive-latex-extra includes dvips (for PostScript), which provides the dvipdf command.

With Guix:

    guix shell --pure git texinfo make nss-certs
    [env] $ git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/c-intro-and-ref.git
    [env] $ cd c-intro-and-ref
    [env] $ make c.info

...and read it in your Info reader; I recommend Emacs (C-u h i /path/to/c RET).

PDF is inferior because it doesn't have a convenient way to access the curated concept or variable index, whereas in Info you can just hit "i" and type something like "array, layout in memory" and jump straight to the relevant paragraph.

On my machine this failed to build the index sections at the end.

The command in the Makefile should be "texi2dvi" or "texi2pdf".

Yeah I wrote a quick `all` rule in the Makefile:

    all: c.info c.pdf c.dvi c.doc c.html c.txt

After building I am getting the title really badly shifted to the right and no contents page. It could be that my tex package is a little broken though.

The entire thread was a worthless soap opera until your comment saved the day, thank you!

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