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This builds up on the question TikZ manual newest version online?: I know where to find the latest version of the TikZ (or PGFplots, or ...) manual online, in PDF form.

But sometime, answering to a question, would be very handy to have a site with the manual on-line, so that you can link to the appropriate section/part directly.

Is there something like that? Would be worthwhile to try to build a site hosting it?

Community
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Rmano
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  • PS --- I tried to download tikz source and build doc/generic/pgf/version-for-tex4ht/en/, but the compilation failed in a lot of points... maybe a need a much more modern system, I don't know. – Rmano Feb 17 '16 at 20:56
  • tried with pdftohtml, no way... – Rmano Feb 18 '16 at 11:37
  • for acrobat you can also link to the page in the pdf but doesn't work with every viewer\ – percusse Feb 19 '16 at 13:57
  • If I could just compile it with tex4ht, I could offer a site to put it... but till now I failed. – Rmano Feb 19 '16 at 15:33
  • Probably that would be a better question so that @michal.h21 can have a look. But notice that PGF manual is a very involved piece of document with auto generating figures links etc. – percusse Feb 19 '16 at 15:40
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    I've tried to compile the pgf manual last summer, it is pretty hard thing. Some configurations for tex4ht are provided for the manual, but they obviously don't work with the current version. I've fixed some issues, but I still wasn't successful, mainly because of the huge size and large number of errors which always halted the compilation. But I was able to compile some chapters. – michal.h21 Feb 19 '16 at 20:47

2 Answers2

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As of 2022, I'm maintaining an HTML version of the current PGF/TikZ manual at https://tikz.dev. It's searchable and allows for deep links such as https://tikz.dev/tikz-paths#pgf.circle (look for the "¶" links).

Screenshot of tikz.dev

Dominik Peters
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    Wow, this is very nice! But I am not sure how to link to a specific subsection, say, 12.2.1? – Rmano Jan 15 '22 at 23:04
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    Thanks. I just added ¶ links to subsections, so now there is https://tikz.dev/tikz-scopes#sec-12.2.1 – Dominik Peters Jan 16 '22 at 04:06
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    Awesome, have you planned to do something similar for PGFPlots? – Stefan Pinnow Jan 16 '22 at 06:18
  • Fantastic. Thanks to share this. – JeT Jan 16 '22 at 21:23
  • This is so cool! Thanks a lot for this amazing work :) Just a small request, can you please add a section which has the specific license information for this webpage (as I assume it will be considered as a derived work) and have a bug-tracker for the sources of this webpage somewhere? – Niranjan Jan 17 '22 at 07:10
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    Accidentally came across with the website and I knew for sure there is a post about it on TeX.SE, so I looked for it specifically to upvote. Thank you for such a useful service. – antshar Mar 23 '23 at 12:21
  • Notice that there is also an (equally excellent) (pgfplots manual online)[https://tikz.dev/pgfplots/] now! – Rmano Oct 24 '23 at 09:15
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As you already read from the comments, there is no HTML version for the manual (not for TikZ and not for pgfplots).

But since many browsers use pdf.js as default viewer for PDFs, you may be able to link to internal links.

Examples are:

http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/pgfplots.pdf#pgfp.axis (links to the axis environment) or

http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/pgfplots.pdf#pgfp./pgfplots/surf (links to the definition of the surf macro).

The same is also possible for TikZ. These anchors are stable, also between versions. They belong the internal cross-referencing system.

I believe that this would be address your use-case up to the fact that

  1. one may need to ensure that pdf.js is used, not some other pdf viewer

  2. the loading times of pdf.js are too long for these manuals. A real HTML version could make use of caching.

As users stated in comments, generating a "real" HTML version is a quite involved task. I have also spent considerable effort in an HTML version of the pgfplots manual, with limited success.

Christian Feuersänger
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  • How would one obtain the link targets? I tried going from links within the document, but they create (in Chrome) targets of the form #page=29&zoom=100,85,816, which are not stable across versions. – A. Donda Jul 06 '20 at 19:39