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docs.gl

docs.gl is a public domain web scaffolding for the OpenGL documentation. The actual documentation website provided by Khronos is in frames and poorly formatted, difficult to navigate and search. docs.gl aims to improve the form factor and quality of the OpenGL documentation.

Contributions Welcome

docs.gl should be thought of as a public wiki backed by GitHub. If you think you can improve the documentation, please consider submitting a pull request. I've uploaded all of the GL version specifications here for convenience.

How To Build It

docs.gl is a python script that reads each man page, processes it, and outputs static HTML. There is no database or server side scripting. All of the templating and processing is done at build time by the python script. It is executed like this:

python compile.py

If you're building for a final release, then you can use the --full parameter which does HTML minification and Unicode processing as well. It looks like this:

python compile.py --full

If you want to build a copy that can be used offline, then you can use the --local-assets parameter which downloads the fonts and Javascript libraries. It then builds the HTML and CSS using the local copies. It looks like this:

python compile.py --local-assets

If you are running Windows, there are a build.bat and a build_full.bat for convenience. When the script is done building, the completed site will be in a folder named htdocs.

Offline Viewing

First compile the files using the --local-assets flag, while in the root project directory run python start_offline_webserver.py which starts a local webserver on port 8000 which can be accessed in your browser by going to the url http://localhost:8000.

If you find that any functionality is missing, please open a pull request.

File Structure

8 directories called el3 sl4 es1 es2 es3 gl2 gl3 and gl4 contain the manual pages for each OpenGL and GLSL command. They are only the inner HTML with header/footer elements such as head and html stripped out. These pages are read and processed by compile.py to produce the final site.

The html directory contains further resources for compiling the site. Files sitting directly in the html directory are template files which are used to further process the manual pages. Inside the template files are tokens that compile.py searches for and dynamically replaces during the compilation process. For example, the token {$current_api} will be replaced with 3.3 or 4.2 depending on the latest version that the command being compiled is available for. All content in the site that changes based on what manual page is being compiled is handled in this way.

Files in the copy folder are used without changes.

Files in the examples folder contain source code examples used in the manual pages. In these files a special token is used to provide a link to a command page. For example {%glBindTexture} will provide a link to https://docs.gl/gl4/glBindTexture if the example appears in a GL4 page. If the example appears in a gl3 page, the link will be updated accordingly.

In the main directory there are some additional helper python scripts. opengl.py and glsl.py contains helper tables, (eg which commands appear in which versions) tables specifying which examples should appear on which pages, and tables specifying the categories that appear in the table of contents of each page. insert_additional.py, make_copyright.py, and strip.py are special one-time-use programs that were used to process the manual pages after they were initially downloaded from Khronos. They could be reused for additional processing. read_spec.py reads the XML OpenGL spec file found in specs/gl.xml and outputs opengl_spec.py, which contains the raw data on which commands belong to which versions. opengl_spec.py should only have to be re-generated when Khronos updates the spec.

To Do

  • Extensions. Display a list of which versions an extension is available for. Display which extension introduces a command.
  • Display on each page "Core in version/core since version" like the OpenGL Wiki does
  • Integrate information from the common mistakes file into the page for each command they pertain to
  • Update each page with any information that may be in the spec but missing in the manual
  • Display on each page which commands are likely to cause a pipeline stall (eg glGet)
  • Display in the ToC on the left which GLSL commands can only be used in certain languages (eg VS, CS, FS, etc)
  • CamelCase Search - eg BFDLI finds glBindFragDataLocationIndexed
  • GLSL 1/3
  • WebGL
  • GLSL syntax cheat sheets. E.G. attribute/varying vs in/out

Thanks to the great people in Freenode ##opengl who provided me good feedback while I was writing this.