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From: gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.tex,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Pricing and cost
Message-ID: <1484@tharr.UUCP>
Date: 5 Dec 90 23:10:40 GMT
References: <657@silence.princeton.nj.us> <1990Dec4.130922.6961@bellcore.bellcore.com> <1990Dec4.133655.15047@noao.edu> <1990Dec4.211419.2599@robobar.co.uk>
Reply-To: gtoal@ed.ac.uk (Graham Toal)
Followup-To: comp.tex
Organization: Power Microsystems Ltd
Lines: 32

In article <1990Dec4.211419.2599@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes:
> 
>> Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages
>> for 4.4BSD ?
>> [ ... ]
>> or else they were going to reformat all the man
>> pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages.
>
>NO!  PLEASE NO!  Even shipping "awf" the "awf"ully slow nroff -m(s|an)
>replacement written in awk by Henry Spencer would be better than that!

I've just discovered 'texinfo' format from the FSF -- it is
structurally marked-up help documentation -- use the 'texinfo.tex'
header file & you get lovely TeX documentation; use the 'texinfo.el'
package in gnu emacs and you get on-line ascii help info.

I haven't actually used the latter, but the former works well.
I suspect the ascii-output version (no TeX needed Ronald :-))
would make a fine basis for a 'man' replacement.  Looking at
some of the documents, the texinfo format seems to allow arbitrary
links between bits of tex which I presume the interactive help
program allows you to navigate.

Perhaps an FSF'er could supply more info?

Graham
(I've crossposted, to catch more people who may know of this, but
followups to comp.text please -- since the subject of this thread
is about the lack of DWB on Unix systems nowadays)
-- 
(* Posted from tharr.uucp - Public Access Unix - +44 (234) 261804 *)


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