HTML version of C standard draft (n1256.pdf)?

Question

Is there an HTML version of n1256.pdf (ISO C99+TC3), or a recommended way to convert it to html or another less-painful format for browsing? All of the pdf converters I've tried have given very poor results, especially in failing to convert the "fi" ligatures to something more easily searchable, but also just with respect to basic formatting.

Here is the original for reference:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf

+1 for that pdf. I was going to ask a question about retrieving that — BlackBear, Feb 04 '11 at 21:42
@BlackBear: you might be interested in [Where do I find the current C or C++ standard documents?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81656/where-do-i-find-the-current-c-or-c-standard-documents). — jweyrich, Feb 04 '11 at 22:20
Google won't process such large files. I've tried `pdftotext`, `pdftohtml`, etc. with fairly poor results, including both ligature issues and symbols turning into random meaningless PUA characters. I suppose a lot of this could be fixed with a script tailored to postprocess the output, so perhaps I should revise my question to ask for such a script... :-) — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, Feb 05 '11 at 05:22
@JL2210: Questions about accessing the standard are completely different from ones asking for books or tutorials. The standard is the authoritative definition of the language. This question and answer have been a valuable resource to the community, and both your attempted tag edit (with the irrelevant tag `conversion`, which is for questions about programming conversions, not about getting authoritative information on the language in an accessible form) and challenge of on-topicness qualify as **defacement** in my mind. — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, May 25 '19 at 16:56
I agree with you that the standard is hard to access. I've retracted my flag and deleted those comments, but I have one question for you: Do the [c] and [standards] tags help in answering the question at all? Also, doesn't the phrase "convert it to html" constitute the [conversion] tag? — S.S. Anne, May 25 '19 at 17:18
@JL2210: The relevant audience of the question, and answers to it, is folks who are trying to understand the C language from a perspective of the standard. As such, I think the [standards] tag is appropriate. I'm not even seeing a tag [conversion], but if there is one on SO, I think it would be for questions about writing code to perform conversions of some sort, not where conversion is a meta-task for the sake of language study. (A tag like [conversion] might be appropriate on other SE sites for a similar question asked in more generality, though.) ... — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, May 25 '19 at 20:18
... It's been a long time now, but I think the main reason I mentioned conversion in the question was to indicate that I had already tried the obvious solution with poor results. In any case, the answers that came out of this question have become a serious resource cited all over the net by people doing analysis of UB and language-lawyering stuff. — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, May 25 '19 at 20:20
@JL2210: No problem. I think I was the first to mis-cite it in the comment above regarding the edit request so you probably just copied my mistake. — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, May 25 '19 at 20:22
You know, it's funny that I asked where to get an official copy of the C18 standard and it was downvoted and almost closed before I deleted it. Times have changed. Since then, I asked this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56307340/is-there-a-way-to-remove-the-diff-marks-from-an-iso-c2x-standard-draft-and-get-j. No response as of yet. — S.S. Anne, May 25 '19 at 20:24
@JL2210: SO unfortunately has a lot of folks who would rather try to rules-lawyer why good questions should be closed/deleted than contribute to building useful resources for the community... My initial reaction to you was largely a result of thinking you were one of them. — R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE, May 25 '19 at 20:30

R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-25T20:21:21.830

16

It seems to be the last draft prior to standardization, rather than C99+TC3, but here's an excellent copy:

http://busybox.net/~landley/c99-draft.html

Edit: And here is C99+TC3: http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c99/n1256.html

And the C11 draft: http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c1x/n1570.html

edited May 25 '19 at 20:21

answered Feb 25 '11 at 02:17

R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE

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The htmlized C11 is now available at [http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html](http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html). *The (obsolete) link to the C1x draft points to a page with the link in this comment.* – pmg Dec 01 '12 at 19:08
@pmg: Thanks! Somehow I failed to notice your comment for what, 7 years? :-) Edited now, though. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE May 25 '19 at 20:21
Lol! It's never too late to improve an answer ;) – pmg May 25 '19 at 22:05

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 04 '11 at 23:17

Best match so far: http://c0x.coding-guidelines.com/

This web site contains a modified version of N1256. It includes wording that has been deleted from C99 (i.e., in struck through form) and wording that does used to appear in C99 (i.e., in underlined form).

The formatting is pretty crude, though…

HTML version of C standard draft (n1256.pdf)?

2 Answers2

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