Print the reference manual

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Ailen Vienne Sebastian

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Apr 22, 2021, 4:47:03 AM4/22/21
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I know I can print a help doc to a text file with :e! cat $VIMRUNTIME/doc/filename.txt. But what about the entire reference manual? Not the user manual, the reference manual. It seems to be composed of different subfiles with different names. Is there any way to sweep through all the files in the reference manual, in order, and print them to the same text file? Thanks very much.

Tony Mechelynck

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Apr 22, 2021, 1:29:18 PM4/22/21
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On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 10:47 AM Ailen Vienne Sebastian
<ailenseb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I know I can print a help doc to a text file with :e! cat $VIMRUNTIME/doc/filename.txt. But what about the entire reference manual? Not the user manual, the reference manual. It seems to be composed of different subfiles with different names. Is there any way to sweep through all the files in the reference manual, in order, and print them to the same text file? Thanks very much.

That would be a very heavy printout, and you would want a page break
between each pair of files.

To print the whole help (user manual _and_ reference manual), only not
the help for additional packages, you may want to start Vim with no
arguments, then set the proper print options (see ":help
print-options") and finally print them all to a file by means of

:args $VIMRUNTIME/doc/*.txt
:argdo hardcopy >~/vimhelp.txt
or similar

(omit ">~/vimhelp.txt" to print to an actual printer).

See
:help :args
:help :argdo
:help print.txt

Best regards,
Tony.

Arlo Gittings

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Apr 22, 2021, 2:42:03 PM4/22/21
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On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 3:47 AM Ailen Vienne Sebastian <ailenseb...@gmail.com> wrote:
I know I can print a help doc to a text file with :e! cat $VIMRUNTIME/doc/filename.txt. But what about the entire reference manual? Not the user manual, the reference manual. It seems to be composed of different subfiles with different names. Is there any way to sweep through all the files in the reference manual, in order, and print them to the same text file? Thanks very much.

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meine

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Apr 22, 2021, 5:29:07 PM4/22/21
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> > I know I can print a help doc to a text file with :e! cat $VIMRUNTIME/doc/filename.txt. But what about the entire reference manual? Not the user manual, the reference manual.
>
> That would be a very heavy printout, and you would want a page break
> between each pair of files.

Maybe it is more practical to buy a reknown book on Vim, like Practical
Vim, and leave the entire reference for reference. Computers are
invented to save and process larege amounts of information, and a
digital reference probably is more accessible than a printed one.

Just some thoughts...

//meine

Ailen Vienne Sebastian

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Apr 22, 2021, 9:01:02 PM4/22/21
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If i enter

:r! cat $VIMRUNTIME/doc/*.txt

 it'll print all the help docs to a buffer. But how to select just the docs from the ref manual? Maybe a sort of "slice", all docs between doc a and b, perhaps?

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Magnus Woldrich

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Apr 22, 2021, 9:07:56 PM4/22/21
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On Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 19:29 Tony Mechelynck <antoine.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

That would be a very heavy printout, and you would want a page break
between each pair of files.

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