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From: phelps@ecstasy.cs.berkeley.edu (Tom Phelps)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: TkMan 1.7, a hypertext manual page browser
Approved: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, peter@taronga.com
Sender: peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Message-ID: <DCJ8Cy.E3F@bonkers.taronga.com>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 03:20:29 GMT
Lines: 103
I have updated TkMan for the new major version of Tk, Tk 4.0. It
requires the latest version of RosettaMan, v2.4.
If you had examined TkMan before but found it too slow, you may want
to take another look: Since version 1.5, everything has been sped up,
including startup, page searching, and page display. If you had found
or now find TkMan unsuitable for other reasons, I'd like to hear them.
Tom
--------------------------------------------------
TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page browser for UNIX.
Compatible with Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, AT&T System V, SunOS, Sun
Solaris, OSF/1, DEC Ultrix, SGI IRIX, Linux, SCO, IBM AIX, FreeBSD
TkMan offers two major advantages over xman: hypertext links to other
man pages (click on a word in the text which corresponds to a man
page, and you jump there), and better navigation within long man pages
with searches (both incremental and regular expression) and jumps to
section headers. TkMan also offers some convenience features, like a
user-configurable list of commonly used man pages, a one-click
printout, and integration of `whatis' and `apropos'. Further, one may
highlight, as if with a yellow marker, arbitrary passages of text in
man pages and subsequently jump directly to these passages by
selecting an identifying excerpt from a pulldown menu. Finally, TkMan
gives one control over the directory-to-menu volume mapping of man
pages with a capability similar to but superior to xman's mandesc in
that rather than forcing all who share a man directory to follow a
single organization, TkMan gives control to the individual. For example,
one may decide he has no use for a large set of man pages--say for
instance the programmer routines in volumes 2, 3, 4, 8--and eliminate
them from his personal database. Or a Tcl/Tk programmer may decide
to group Tcl/Tk manual pages in their own volume listing.
Other features include:
* full text search of man pages (with Glimpse, optional)
* a list of recently added or changed manual pages
* a "history" list of recently visited pages
* a user-configurable "shortcuts" or "hot" list
* a preferences panel to control fonts, colors, and other system settings
* compatibility with compressed pages (both source and formatted)
* when asking to print a page that available only in formatted form,
TkMan can try to reverse compile it to create [tn]roff source,
which can then be reformatted as good-looking PostScript
A new version of TkMan is now available for anonymous ftp at
<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/tkman.tar.Z>
You also need the latest version of RosettaMan, a manual page filter:
<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z>
TkMan 1.7 requires Tcl 7.4 or later and Tk 4.0, which are
available on ftp.smli.com in the /pub/tcl directory.
Among the NEW features since version 1.6 are:
* Compatibility with Tcl 7.4/Tk 4.0
* Much faster searching within text buffer,
taking advantage of a new feature in Tk 4.0
* Manual pages read in ~40% less time, once found in the database
and filtered through nroff if necessary
* Automated Glimpse indexing of compressed files
(i.e., .glimpse_filters file created automatically--existing .glimpse_filters
files are left unchanged)
* Back door to use local man command. Useful in situations when the MANPATH
changes frequently. You do lose some functionality, however.
* Volume listings set in columns for easier reading
Among the NEW features since version 1.5 are:
* database of man page names stored on disk, so once the database is built...
startup much quicker, searching faster, volume listings faster
also, the help page comes up much quicker
In sum, these changes make TkMan much more usable on slower machines.
* full text search through man pages with Glimpse (optional)
* Preferences panel to choose fonts, colors and other options
* list of recently added or changed manual pages
* likely man page references distinguished with typewriter font
(Michael Harrison)
* hypertext list of all man pages with highlights (Steven S. Dick)
* support for short UNIX file names (for old file systems)
* support for saving formatted pages to H-P's cat.Z directories
* support for LANG environment variable (Yasuro Kawata)
* TKMAN environment variable searched for command line options
* Help file maintained in HTML and automatically converted for use in TkMan.
This means that one can use a WWW browser to read the help and
generate a PostScript version to print out.
* incremental searches highlight match
* manual page filter slightly improved (handles OSF and GNU formatting)
* error checking on MANPATH and existence of supporting executables
* support for Linux Filesystem Structure (FSSTND) (Martin Wunderli)
* support for IBM's AIX
Long-time TkMan users can remove bin/bs2tk, lib/taputils.tcl, lib/utils.tcl,
lib/searchbox.tcl.
--
phelps@CS.Berkeley.EDU