Package: debian-reference Version: 2.100 Severity: wishlist Hello,
I'm studying the English Debian Reference 2.100. For me, the HTML and PDF versions, and the plain-text version with hardcoded line breaks, are simply impossible to read comfortably. Markdown in Obsidian makes a huge difference: I can finally read the book in a format that works for me and keep it alongside my study notes. Could the build provide Markdown output alongside HTML and the other formats? As a proof of concept, I converted the complete English book from its DocBook XML source to GitHub Flavored Markdown: the preface, 12 chapters and appendix, plus a README. The source was: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-reference Tag: debian/2.100 Commit: 10151371e400a1dba15a34c67cf758cf081afb85 The conversion used Pandoc after resolving the source entities and applying the repository's table and URL transforms. It did not use the packaged HTML as input. All 303 code blocks and 170 tables were checked against the XML, and the 235 internal reference destinations were checked. Relative links work when the Markdown files are kept together. This is a proof of concept, not a ready-to-merge build patch or a line-by-line editorial review. Some handling was needed for admonitions, table captions and cross-references. Wide tables also depend on the reader's Markdown viewer. Would an optional Markdown build target, using Pandoc or another suitable converter, be worth adding? The aim would be to generate the files from the same source, without maintaining a separate copy of the book. I've attached a screenshot of the converted preface in Obsidian. A sample chapter and the README are also available if useful. Thank you for the book. Osmancito
