lib reference in Unix man format

[Quinn Dunkan]

On 28 Jan 2000 10:46:05 -0500, François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>William Park <parkw at better.net> writes:
>
>> HTML is essentially killed INFO, in my opinion.
>
>There is still one thing from Info which is sorely lacking in HTML, which
>is the lack of capability to textually search in a whole document.

And don't forget the the ability to run info through TeX and come up with nice
printed docs.  I'm sure similar tools exist for html, but TeX is the standard
for high quality typesetting.

>I have a big deal of Texinfo documentation in both Info and HTML format,
>here, and Info is much more useful that HTML browsers.  In my opinion, Info
>was hurt by die-hard `man' addicts on one side, and more by the popularity
>of HTML than its real virtues.  Info needs you to know the first letter
>of the words Next, Previous, Up and Menu, and to use the SPACE key to
>page forward.  Nothing worth whipping a cat, really.

Despite this, I always had a lot of trouble trying to remember the keystrokes
to the info browser.  It annoyed me so much I would often read info with less.
I don't have any trouble with keystrokes for other programs, but for some
reason I could never grasp info.  I always assumed gnu put a minimal amount of
effort into info because they used emacs and assumed everyone else did too.

The concept of a simple, unified, hyperlink-capable, readable as plain text
but can also be typeset nicely documentation is something I think is a great
idea.  I was never very fond of sgml (or xml) for its complexity.  So I was
unhappy that info wasn't practical for me.  Should have been integrated into
man anyway.  Oh well.


oops, this is getting off-topic...