Offline reference has been removed for 4.x, build a new version

[benfry]

Since the start of the project, we've included an offline copy of the reference with the software, which powers “Find in Reference” and the links in the Help menu. This is especially helpful/important for people with lower internet availability (i.e for situations where internet is disconnected, slow, or expensive).

With the site redesign launched in 2021, the size of the reference.zip file has jumped from 4.2 MB to about 100 MB, which means it no longer makes sense to include it with the download. For 4.0 beta 9, we're removing the offline reference (because it's out of date) and linking to the online reference until we have a better solution that can produce a custom (and compact) offline reference like we had for 1.x – 3.x.

This is a high priority for us. Certainly many people had no idea that this exists, but there are also many people who relied on this quite a bit, particularly those in important communities for us (outside the US, limited internet resources, and so on).

[benfry]

Related: processing/processing-website#213

[benfry]

@SableRaf so in the meantime, what we need here is an additional stage to the GitHub action that copies the site to S3. It could either:

1. attach a .zip file of the created site to the tagged release on GitHub (equivalent to the zipped contents of the public folder), and the PDE can pull it from there
2. create a .zip and post it somewhere on S3 and we can use that url

(The first option is definitely preferred.)

With this, we can have a menu item for “download offline reference” as an interim solution. The zipped file download would still be 69 MB, but would at least be a temporary fix to bring the feature back.

[benfry]

@SableRaf you can see how this works in this release: https://github.com/processing/processing-website/releases/tag/2022-10-05-1459

That reference.zip file is being used for the new “Download Offline Reference” option in Processing 4.1 (arriving shortly), and if we can simply automate the process so that the .zip is generated on each build and added to the GitHub release, I can have it automatically update.

[benfry]

Resolved (partially) for Processing 4.1 (available soon), which adds a “Download Offline Reference” item to the Help menu.

More documentation about the offline reference is here: https://github.com/processing/processing4/wiki/Offline-Reference

And @SableRaf can you add a new issue to the web repo to track reducing the footprint of the reference file from 66 MB?

[github-actions]

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