A script to convert Vim documentation to hyperlinked PDF, using LaTeX

Vim documentation in PDF format

These scripts create a PDF document containing the documentation that ships with Vim, as well as the Vim FAQ. The resulting file is more than 2,500 pages of hyperlinked, colorful PDF.

The resulting PDF file can be downloaded at http://nathangrigg.net/vimhelp/

The text to LaTeX conversion script, along with linking and highlighting, are based on the text to html conversion script written by Carlo Teubner.

Building the PDF

The PDF can be generated by running make. The automatic build script requires git and xelatex. It also uses some fonts that you may not have installed on your computer. You can edit preamble.tex to get around this.

The contents.txt file can be used to reorder the text files in the pdf or eliminate some entirely. Note that any links into text files that are removed will break.

The default make command makes a US letter sized PDF. You may also run make a4 or make ipad for different PDF sizes.

Latex requires multiple runs for things like generating the table of contents. You will have to run make twice for everything to work right. For this reason, running make with a PDF target will always run LaTeX, even if everything appears to be up to date.

Running make update will download the newest version of the Vim documentation.

If you want to reduce the size of the final PDF by a couple of hundred pages you can the exclude the Vim FAQ by using:

make FAQ=no ...

which will pass the --no-faq switch to the h2h.py script.