[MLUG] note on the excellence of the GNU Texinfo documentation system

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Those GNU people are smart.  I was just admiring the nicely formatted help 
pages in Emacs...

http://epirh1.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/emacs/screenshot.png

...and realizing that they seem to be info pages (accessible by the info 
command in Linux), then I remembered seeing a texi2pdf program on the 
Linux system, then I remembered seeing a bunch of .texi files in the man 
directory of the Emacs source tree.  For some reason those texi files are 
not installed on the system.  So I went back to local/src and did this:

tar zxvf emacs-22.1.tar.gz
cd emacs-22.1/man
texi2pdf emacs.texi

Just a few seconds later I had a beautifully formatted PDF of the 
brand-new, 561-page, 3.4 MB Emacs 22.1 manual with hyperlinks.  Check it 
out:

http://epirh1.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/emacs/emacs.pdf

You have to admit that this is a truly spectacular way of doing 
documentation.  It allows you to translate to several different formats. 
Here's a brief summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texinfo

So with texi2html I was able to bang out this giant 3.8 MB version of the 
same documentation with the same neat hyperlinking:

http://epirh1.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/emacs/emacs.html

Part of the beauty of Linux is that all of this amazing GNU software is 
readily available to the user.  On Solaris, where I cut my UNIXy teeth, 
and which I still use, it's not so nice and easy.  A goal for the next few 
months is to dump Solaris and go fully into Linux.  I think it won't be 
much longer before I get rid of Windows too.

Mike

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