#Installation

• Install php 5.3+ [you should no way want to read laravel docs offline if you don't have it installed already :-)]
• Install git if you already don't have it.
• Install pandoc with recommended pdf library for your OS.
• Make sure all the above tools are available to be used in command line shell, otherwise update your $PATH environment variable to include these in your $PATH
• Clone this repo using following command from the terminal after moving into the directory where you want to keep the files

  git clone https://github.com/sphinxcorp/laravel-offline-docs-gen.git laravel-offline-docs-gen

#Generating offline documents

After you have completed the installation of required libraries & cloned the repo, you can build offline documentation for Laravel 4 by simply issueing following command from within the cloned directory.

  sh gen-doc.sh

With above command the documentation will be generated in pdf format with name l4docs.pdf in the same directory. For most cases this will suffice your need of using this tool, but if not, then move on...

##Output formats

The default output format is pdf & the default file name is l4docs.pdf, but as pandoc is a versatile file format converter you can actually generate offline documents of any of format that pandoc supports for output file. For example if you want to generate the offline document in html format, just pass a filename with .html extension as the first argument of the script as follows:

  sh gen-doc.sh l4docs.html

To know more about the supported formats see explanation of -t && -o options in documentation for pandoc or man page for pandoc

Additionally you can pass any options that pandoc supports to control or fine tune the generated document as per your need. For example, the following command will generate an html5 document instead of html4 (which is default for html output)

  sh gen-doc.sh l4docs.html -t html5

#Customization

To control the output of generated files, this tool uses pandoc templates some default templates available from https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-templates as a git submodule. If you have the knowledge of customizing those templates, feel free to hack & twek the existing templates to meet your needs. Also for a comprehensive documentation of pandoc, please refer to the github repo for pandoc.

#For the impatient

If you don't want to build the document on your own, or just want to look at the default build, you can download the deafult pdf file directly from this repository.

#Contributing

If you find any bug, please file an issue in github issue tracker or fork & send pull request with fixes.