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======================================================================
Read a review at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue23/tkman.html
Complete details and downloading information at
http://tkman.sourceforge.net
WHAT'S NEW 8.4:
* The license is now free for any use under the Artistic License.
* The old elided text patch has been incorporated into core Tk,
so TkMan runs on unmodified Tcl/Tk.
WHAT'S NEW 8.3:
* Tcl/Tk 8.3 has incoroprated the elided text patch, so TkMan is now
even easier to install. (The patch as hijacked by the dash patch
collection had a confusing interface; fortunately reason prevailed
and Tcl/Tk 8.3 uses the sensible original.)
* Direct support for Solaris 7 and 8's SGML version of man pages
(no need to batch convert to roff format with catman -c).
* Over the past several years, it has been reimplemented from scratch
and is now Open Source, under the Artistic License (see
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.html).
(Version 1.4, released in 1993, was claimed to be encumbered,
though it was never defended.)
* SGI support fixed vis-a-vis last beta. SGI should be faster on
"messy" catman directories.
TkMan is mature and stable. New releases mostly just track changes in
Tcl/Tk and (sigh) manual page formats and directory organizations.
Read a review at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue23/tkman.html
Complete details and downloading information at
http://tkman.sourceforge.net
======================================================================
TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page and Texinfo browser for
UNIX. TkMan boasts hypertext links, (optional) outline view of man pages,
high quality display and superior navigational interface to Texinfo documents,
a novel information visualization mechanism called Notemarks, full text
search among man pages and Texinfo, incremental and regular expression
search within pages, regular expression search within Texinfo that
shows all matches (not just the next), robust yellow highlight
annotations, a shortcut/hot list, lists of all pages in user
configurable volumes, a comprehensive Preferences panel, man page
versioning support, and unmatched online text formatting and display
quality, among many other features.
"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 many 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
direct jumps to sections of a page. TkMan also offers some
convenience features, like a user-configurable list of commonly used
man pages, a one-click printout, and integration of `apropos'.
The Texinfo browser takes a very different approach than any other GNU
info brower, and thereby is able to provide a number of advantages not
usually possible. (1) TkMan's browser works from the Texinfo source,
as opposed to a compiled form that has been formatted for character
terminal displays, and therefore can and does provide much better
looking text, in multiple fonts (proportionally-spaced for body text,
typewriter for computer text, bold and italics, blue hyperlinks for
crossreferences, and even a cedilla and a lowered E in TeX). (2) An
outlining interface that continuously gives overview and context to
navigation within the document, as opposed to the system of nodes with
only immediate neighbors known (next, previous, parent), which, at
least for me, very quickly leads to being "lost in info-space". All
this costs disk space of only 2% over the original source files, which
themselves may be compressed.
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.
(Highlights are robust across changes to page content and movement of
the file.) Pages are given an outlining user interface whereby the
text of a section can be collapsed or expanded underneath its header,
independently of other sections. Within otherwise collapsed sections,
a variety of Notemarks(TM) can appear. Notemarks are excerpts from
the text showing highlighted text, command-line options, search
results, or the first line of each paragraph in that section, and
shown in context with section headers and other Notemarks.
Functioning as a note, a Notemark may itself communicate sufficient
information; functioning as a bookmark, it can be clicked on to
automatically expand the corresponding section and scroll to that
point. Notemarks provide numerous immediately available hooks into
long texts to expedite identification of a desired passage.
Other features include:
* full text search of man pages AND Texinfo files (with Glimpse; optional)
* when searching for documentation, try Texinfo names too, and
optionally) prefer Texinfo documentation to man page
* individualized directory-to-volume mappings
* if an old version of the page is available under RCS,
optionally show differences: additions as italics, deletions
as overstrike, changes as bold italics. It would be interesting
if someone created RCS files for Tcl/Tk since Tcl 1.0.
It takes a little work to set up, but try it out.
* when multiple pages match the search name, a pulldown list of all matches
* regular expression searches for manual page names
* man page name completion
* Fuzzy search for man page names if not exact match found
(e.g., "srcolbzart" finds "scrollbar")
* list of recently added or changed manual pages
* "history" list of recently visited pages
* user-configurable "shortcuts" or "hot" list
* comprehensive 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,
* Helper script "retkman" that can be used to restart TkMan after
changes to the MANPATH in a shell, either manually or as a side effect
of a modules management system.
* 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
|
