RE: Looking for man pages

["Williams, Gerald S (Jerry)" <Jerry dot Williams at lsi dot com>]

Brian Dessent wrote:
> The idea behind texinfo is a format-independent way of writing
> documentation.  'info' is just one of a million ways to view this same
> documentation. [...]

Yes, especially for make, I've found the info files to be the best
reference, and they're easily navigable. I'm in the "mildly tolerate"
category for the info viewer, however. I mostly use tkinfo (easily
googled) to browse info files.

However (bringing the discussion back on-topic for the list), I had to
make some tweaks to tkinfo to get it to run properly under Cygwin. The
main issue was with the commands used to automatically decompress info
files. Cygwin implements zcat and gunzip as shell scripts, and (for me
at least) the Tcl interpreter didn't handle them properly. I've been
assuming this is because wish isn't really a Cygwin executable.

Anyway, you simply need to change the value of tki(compresscat-*) to
use "gzip -d -c" rather than zcat/gunzip. The following shows what I
changed for TkInfo version 2.8:

$ diff -u orig/tkinfo-2.8/tkinfo tkinfo-2.8/tkinfo 
--- orig/tkinfo-2.8/tkinfo      2004-03-22 19:56:39.000000000 -0400
+++ tkinfo-2.8/tkinfo   2007-08-08 12:23:36.856250000 -0400
@@ -562,9 +562,12 @@
     set tki(self)              [info script]
     set tki(timestatusB)       0
     set tki(iconic)             0
-    set tki(compresscat-Z)     "zcat"
-    set tki(compresscat-z)     "gunzip -c"
-    set tki(compresscat-gz)    "gunzip -c"
+    # set tki(compresscat-Z)   "zcat"
+    # set tki(compresscat-z)   "gunzip -c"
+    # set tki(compresscat-gz)  "gunzip -c"
+    set tki(compresscat-Z)     "gzip -d -c"
+    set tki(compresscat-z)     "gzip -d -c"
+    set tki(compresscat-gz)    "gzip -d -c"
     set tki(compresscat-bz2)    "bunzip2 -c"
     set tki(rawHeadersB)       [option get . showheaders Showheaders]
     set tki(showButtonsB)      [option get . showbuttons Showbuttons]

I also found that it helps to customize the Tkinfo settings in your
.Xdefaults file. In particular, the default fonts looked pretty bad
for me in Cygwin. Here's how I set them:

Tkinfo*font:		{Tahoma} 9
Tkinfo*Text.font:		{Lucida Console} 12

-Jerry

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