Neovim user manual

My idea of generating the Neovim user manual as a nice-looking PDF is slowly advancing! It’s still early stages, but I now have a draft PR to show what I’m trying to achieve.

The idea is to add a PDF output to the script that generates the HTML version of the user manual.

I was originally going for LaTeX, since that’s the most well-known way to generate a good-looking PDF, but somebody mentioned Typst and I’m giving it a go. It’s a lot newer but also simpler, so it might be good enough for the first version. And it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to migrate to LaTeX later, should that prove necessary.

First milestone: validate the plan by generating the entire user manual. Then I’ll figure out how to integrate the PDF output nicely inside the existing script.

An interesting read

In other news, I just finished reading Pierre Berton’s Klondike, about the gold rush of 1896-1899. An interesting read! I found this passage particularly noteworthy:

Almost anything was salable if it had the name “Klondike” attached to it. Optometrists sold Klondike glasses, rubber manufacturers hawked Klondike boots, drugstores peddled Klondike medicine chests, restaurants dispensed Klondike soup; everything from stoves to blankets suddenly bore the necromantic name. It had become a magic word, a synonym for sudden and glorious wealth, a universal panacea, a sort of voodoo incantation which, whispered, shouted, chanted, or sung, worked its own subtle witchery.

This is from the 1972 revision of a book originally published in 1958, relating events that happened in 1897.

Somebody once told me that studying history is pointless, since it all happened in the past and nothing about it can be changed. I disagree. Knowing a bit of history helps make sense of current events and have an idea how things will evolve.