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From: phelps@ecstasy.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Phelps)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce
Subject: ANNOUNCE: TkMan 1.8, a hypertext manual page browser
Date: 13 Nov 1996 17:49:46 -0600
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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A new version of TkMan, 1.8, is now available for anonymous ftp at
<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/tkman.tar.Z>
You also need RosettaMan, a manual page filter:
<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z>
TkMan also requires Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1, or later versions, which are
available on ftp.smli.com in the /pub/tcl directory.
Some people use their web browser for man pages. TkMan is written
specifically for man pages and with its additional knowledge of the
domain can do a better job. Like what? Read on.
======================================================================
TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page browser for UNIX.
Compatible with Sun Solaris, SunOS, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, OSF/1, DEC
Ultrix, AT&T System V, SGI IRIX, Linux, SCO, IBM AIX, FreeBSD, BSDI
"I encourage you to use TkMan for reading man pages. ...
TkMan provides an extremely pleasant GUI for browsing man
pages. I cannot describe all the nice features of TkMan in
this small space. Instead I will merely say that I now
actually look forward to reading man pages as long as I can do
it with TkMan."
-- Don Libes, _Exploring Expect_, page 21
TkMan offers two major advantages over man and 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 instance, or a Tcl/Tk programmer may decide to group
Tcl/Tk manual pages in their own volume listing, or a nonprogrammer
may decide he has no use for instance the programmer routines in
volumes 2, 3, 4, 8--and eliminate them from his personal database.
Other features include:
* full text search of man pages (with Glimpse, optional)
* when multiple pages match the search name, a pulldown list of all matches
* regular expression searches for manual page names
* 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)
* diagnostics on your manual page installation
* elision of those unsightly page headers and footers,
* and, when asking to print a page available only in formatted form,
reverse compilation into [tn]roff source, which can then be reformatted
as good-looking PostScript
Among the NEW features in version 1.8 are:
* Compatibility with Tcl 7.5/Tk 4.1
* Highlight annotations automatically repositioned when man page changes
(robust across page reformats, once old highlights updated to new style.
When updating, use your current version of RosettaMan.)
It is now reasonable to invest effort in highlights with confidence
that they'll persist.
* Option for unified Glimpse index (under Preferences/Misc), which
can be used for local indexes, as an alternative to the
index-per-MANPATH directory option.)
* Searching backward for regular expressions in a man page
* Page's command line options summarized as cascade menu under relevant section
in Sections menu. This is useful for pages like Tk's canvas, which describes
several graphical object types, each with its own set of options.
* Compensation for nonstandardness in GNU and UnixWare sed
* SGI support completely solved (Scott Nelson)
* fixed man.conf support (for BSDI, Linux),
which is important in the absence of a MANPATH (Hagen Finley, Jeffrey C Honig)
* on SCO, section names taken from /usr/default/man (Bela Lubkin)
* man page names with colons (as in Perl 5) recognized
* option for single mouse click to activate hyperlink (someone in CS160)
* fixed bug related to find and the recent page list that caused inordinately
long database build times on some systems (Vinnie Shelton)
* No more problems with "stray cats" (those pages in cat directories only):
now all pages in man and cat directories are examined (and duplicates discarded),
with only a small increase in database build time. (Actually, stray cats are
still not indexed with Glimpse).
* Much faster startup on SGI (Paul Raines)
Among the NEW features in version 1.7 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