Publish API reference as Dash-compatible docsets

[miki725]

Clear and concise description of the problem

Website docs are pretty great but it would also very useful to publish same API docs as docsets for use by docs apps such as Dash. Dash is paid Mac-only app however it opened its docset format for others to use. There are open-source Dash-compatible equivalent apps which use the same format such as Zealdocs.

By publishing the docs it will allow new faker users to quickly reference API docs without needing a browser.

Docs how to create docsets - https://kapeli.com/docsets

Suggested solution

Publish docset and add it as a Dash feed for easy installation.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[github-actions]

Thank you for your feature proposal.

We marked it as "waiting for user interest" for now to gather some feedback from our community:

• If you would like to see this feature be implemented, please react to the description with an up-vote (:+1:).
• If you have a suggestion or want to point out some special cases that need to be considered, please leave a comment, so we are aware about them.

We would also like to hear about other community members' use cases for the feature to give us a better understanding of their potential implicit or explicit requirements.

We will start the implementation based on:

• the number of votes (:+1:) and comments
• the relevance for the ecosystem
• availability of alternatives and workarounds
• and the complexity of the requested feature

We do this because:

• There are plenty of languages/countries out there and we would like to ensure that every method can cover all or almost all of them.
• Every feature we add to faker has "costs" associated to it:
  • initial costs: design, implementation, reviews, documentation
  • running costs: awareness of the feature itself, more complex module structure, increased bundle size, more work during refactors

---

View more issues which are waiting for user interest

[ST-DDT]

Would this be similar to having a downloadable pdf for the api docs (or windows .chm/linux man help files)?

Where would you use that?
What would be the benefit of that file/documentation format over the actual typescript support provided by an IDE?

[miki725]

I guess some people might use pdf but in my opinion the benefit of docsets is the fuzzy search which pdf/manpage would not provide. docsets allow to search different methodd/properties across the whole library whereas in editor you would need to remember something about the lib in order for autocomplete to show you anything useful such as which category has the method you need. for example is email under string/internet? I personally found https://fakerjs.dev/api/ very helpful in those cases as it enumerates all methods in one place but it requires going to that page in the first place. with docsets its a single search away in the Dash (or similar) app.

here is for example what searching cse (note the mis-spelling) in lodash yields:

granted you have the be the user of such as app but I think it would add value to existing Dash (or similar) if faker would publish its docs in Dash-compatible format. obviously its not required and existing docs are good, it would be just nice to have docsets as well

[ST-DDT]

Don't forget to up-vote your own feature request. 😉

[ST-DDT]

Workaround

• Use our api-docs https://fakerjs.dev/api/