> Followup to: <199908040413.WAA07796@ellpspace.math.ualberta.ca>
> By author: Michal Jaegermann <michal@ellpspace.math.ualberta.ca>
> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> >
> > torvalds> The "info" interface makes sense only to people who grok GNU
> > torvalds> emacs,
> >
> > I do not get it. There is a number of different info readers around,
> > with different interfaces. In particular both KDE and Gnome have
> > one included (integrated with another stuff). I do not see why
> > somebody who thinks that a "better" interface could be used will not
> > simply write one. If it will be really better then it will be
> > used all over the place and there will be no problem.
> >
Most people just don't have the time to write, search for, or recompile
another better interface. Especially for stuff like info for which there is
a good enougth alternative, man, which also happens to be highly portable
(highly portable in that I don't have to recompile info for every system.
man is already included.) As for the better readers I really haven't seen
anything other than info for text mode, who's user interface quite frankly
sucks. Its too bad they haven't taken lynx's user interface, which is much
better constructed.
> > torvalds> and if you actually want to be user-friendly you either
> > torvalds> use "man" (because that's how everything else is documented
and
> > torvalds> then you could actually just tell people to use man
everywhere)
> >
> > This is somewhat ridiculous for documents with sizes of a few hundreds
> > pages (and your disk is likely full of such documents). This was tried
> > with Perl4, for example, and results were not very friendly.
> > A 'manpage' around 10 printed pages in size is already pushing, IMO.
> >
>
I have seen man with much more than 10 pages work quite fine on my
system. Older systems with older versions of man or proprietary mans like
whats included in SCO or Sun you may have a point.
> OTOH, it is even more ridiculous to not maintain the man page for
> "cp".
>
> >
> > Actually 'info' is a hypertext format which predates HTML by years and,
> > if you look a bit closer, is **much** better suited for most of a
computer
> > documentation than HTML which really has a different purpose in life;
> > grepping through HTML is not a very nice experience most of the time,
> > for example. There are other advantages as well. Moreover nobody
writes
> > 'info' files by hand but they are generated from 'texinfo' sources
> > which have converters to few other formats, including printed books,
> > and there was somewhere 'texi2html' as well. As for reader interfaces -
> > once again, nothing in the format dictates how they should look like.
> >
>
> There are some MAJOR problems with info, however; one of them being
> the requirement of a system-wide index, which usually doesn't work too
> well at all. man pages get installed and they are immediately
> recognizable.
>
> Furthermore, there is the complete lack of even optional formatting
> hints in the browsable form; although you can generate formatting from
> TeX the result lacks all the references. If there was a dvi browser
> which would preserve the hyperlinks, that would perhaps be another
> issue; perhaps someone ought to make a decent way for TeX to output
> PDF...
>
> Grepping through HTML *source* may suck (as would grepping through
> TeXinfo source or troff source) but HTML can be converted to ASCII
> text; in fact, "lynx -dump" does a pretty good job with it (I wish
> there was a half-decent command-line HTML to PS converter, too.)
>
If you don't mind lynx style formatting. Perfectly fine for documentation.
lynx -dump file.html | enscript --output=file.ps -
or for printing to printer p1
lynx -dump file.html | enscript --printer=p1 -
or for the quick and dirty approach for graphical HTML. If you don't mind
keeping a machine around with the evil empire's OS and you want to just
print the HTML you could also quickly and easily create a server program in
Delphi using Borland's HTML component and print and/or convert the documents
by sending them to that server for processing through a Perl script. Delphi
and/or VB can also do this task by linking to the IE browser component or by
talking to netscape (or IE) thru DDE, OLE, or the crappy and unstable
registry entries. In Windows netscape has a command line parameter to send
pages to the printer 'netscape /print("htmldoc")', perhaps something similar
exists in Netscape for Linux. Its not the above, I already tried it.
> -hpa
> --
> "The user's computer downloads the ActiveX code and simulates a 'Blue
> Screen' crash, a generally benign event most users are familiar with
> and that would not necessarily arouse suspicions."
> -- Security exploit description on http://www.zks.net/p3/how.asp
>
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