EOL (End of Life) for PDF version of the documentation

[jmcnamara]

For the last ~10 years I've produced a PDF version of the XlsxWriter documentation with each release (example).

It mainly uses Sphinx and latexpdf with some some pre-processing of the .tex files to resize some images and to fix up the code blocks. However, I've had to maintain my Sphinx version at 1.2.3 to continue to support these modifications.

I also had a slight modified version of the bootcamp theme for the Readthedocs output that worked with older versions of Sphinx. That recently stopped working on Readthedocs (#1021) and I had to upgrade to a modern version of Sphinx and a different theme. A side effect of this is that the PDF file production no longer works (for anything other than the title page).

I could probably fix the technical issues (I can usually fix anything) but I don't feel it is worth the effort. There are also some secondary benefits of not producing a PDF:

• The distro will be smaller
• The release time will be faster. The PDF build took several minutes. No much in the overall scheme of things but still.
• The latexpdf build was very fragile and needed a lot of tweaking of latex to get it working.

As such I'd like to drop support for shipping a PDF version of the docs. That will happen in the next release.

[jkyeung]

I'm pretty old-school and happen to prefer the PDFs. I like having something completely local and not dependent on an Internet connection. However, I fully understand and agree with your reasons for dropping support. In your place, I would probably give up on the PDFs at this point also.