Reduce the footprint of the reference file

[SableRaf]

As mentioned by @benfry in processing/processing4#524 the offline reference is now downloadable as a separate file from within the PDE. The download size is around 66 MB which we would like to reduce further to improve accessibility to all users regardless of their internet connection's bandwidth.

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

cc @runemadsen

[Arya-Gupta]

Hey @SableRaf, I would like to work on this. But I'm unsure about how the size can be reduced. Do you have any suggestions?

[runemadsen]

Hi @Arya-Gupta! I have been looking into this, and I wrote up my initial thoughts in this issue: processing/processing-website#421. The bottom line is that this is not a single feature to implement, but a range of things that need to be changed in the Gatsby site in order to produce a smaller zip file. One of the things that we're thinking about is making a separate build that disables the responsive images in order to only produce a single version of each image. It would be amazing to get some help on this, but it would require us to do some proper planning before the work begins.

[SableRaf]

@runemadsen Do you think the reducing the reference.zip filesize would be a good project for Google Summer of Code? And would you be willing to mentor for the project? If so I would add it to our GSoC project list.

[runemadsen]

I'm not sure I have the time to mentor such a project right now. It might be a good thing to tackle during GSoC, but I'm a little afraid of how technical it is and the planning required to pull it off.

[SableRaf]

That's alright thanks @runemadsen for considering it! If you can think of someone who would be a good mentor for this let me know and we may still add this to GSoC 2023.