298 captures

17 Jan 1999 - 13 May 2025

Oct	FEB	Apr
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2000	2002	2003

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About this capture

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Organization: Alexa Crawls

Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.

Collection: Alexa Crawl DJ

Crawl DJ from Alexa Internet. This data is currently not publicly accessible.

TIMESTAMPS

TkInfo: a free browser for info files

Most GNU software documentation is written in the texinfo format (a very restricted dialect of TeX) and then converted to the info hypertext file format; tkInfo is a graphical browser for these hypertext files. It requires Tcl7.4 and Tk4.0 or better and runs on all systems which are supported by Tcl/Tk, i.e., Unix with X, Next, Windows 3.1/95/98, Windows NT, and Macintosh. Tcl/Tk is a free scripting language for quick development of portable graphical user interfaces, among other things.

Features of tkInfo include:

• Intuitive point-and-click interface.
• Supports index lookups (for info files which contain an index).
• File-wide search (exact or regular expression).
• Multiple windows.
• "Redirect window feature" (bound to right mouse button) allows easy exploring of large menus.
• Repeatedly hitting Space will scroll through the whole info file in logical order.
• Can be operated with little mouse movement: important commands bound to right button, scrolling with middle button, selecting with left button.
• Quick mouse-less operation: Tab jumps from link to link, Return selects, key bindings almost identical to the ones of the standard info program and emacs' info mode.
• History list of visited info nodes.
• Can be embedded into other Tcl/Tk programs to provide on-line help.
• Deals with compressed info files.

• Screenshot
• Linux Software Map entry
• README file for tkinfo 2.5
• tkinfo-2.5.tar.gz download
• Ken's original version of tkInfo

There's also a RedHat-style .rpm package of tkInfo and a Debian-style .deb package and a Slackware-style slackpack. These need not always be completely up to date though. You may be able to find newer RedHat and Debian packages at the GroundZero site.

I maintain a list of people who would like to get announcements about new versions of tkinfo. Send me some email if you would like to be added to that list.

Other free programs to process texinfo/info files

• The texinfo package at ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/ includes the makeinfo program that converts texinfo to info. It also allows you to produce high-quality printed documentation from texinfo files, using TeX. Furthermore, it includes the program info, a character based browser for info files, and documentation about the texinfo system.
• The editor Emacs at ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/ includes an info reader which allows for key-based or mouse-based operation. Newer versions of the editor contain a cool feature, the "speedbar", which provides a nice navigatable tree view of info files. Emacs was originally a Unix program, but has since been ported to Windows platforms.
• XEmacs, a variant of Emacs available from http://www.xemacs.org/, includes the most powerful info reader to date; it supports bookmarks, annotations, incremental search and index lookups. It is more user friendly than the emacs info mode but still not too intuitive to use. Once you've read the available help text you'll love it though. Xemacs is huge and runs, contrary to what its name might suggest, on Unix, Windows and Macs.
• TkMan, a very comfortable man page reader available from ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/, now includes a texinfo viewer. TkMan's formatting of info nodes looks much better than that of an ordinary info reader (such as tkInfo) and it also provides a nice tree based view of the file structure; however, it needs the texinfo sources of the documentation, not the info files. The latest version of tkMan also needs a patched version of Tk8.0 which is kind of annoying. Runs on Unix.
• Pinfo is a Unix text-mode browser for info files and man pages which works very much like the text-mode web browser lynx. It can be gotten from http://zeus.polsl.gliwice.pl/~pborys/
• Pdftex can produce pdf files from texinfo input using the pdftexinfo.tex macros which come with the pdftex distribution. This produces nice, searchable, cross-linked files with indexes and tables of contents which can then be viewed with programs like xpdf or acroread. Pdftex can be gotten from http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/systems/pdftex/
• Kdehelp is an integrated browser for HTML documents, man pages and info files. It is part of the KDE desktop/GUI and can be gotten from the KDE homepage. KDE is designed for Unix.
• Gnome Help Browser is an integrated browser for HTML documents, man pages and info files. It is part of the Gnome desktop/GUI and can be gotten from the GNOME homepage. GNOME is designed for Unix.
• Minfo from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/doctools/ is a graphical info reader built on Motif and has a Mosaic-like interface. Much faster than tkInfo, but not quite as many features.
• Saxinfo from ftp://nexus.v-wave.com/pub/linux/ is a simple info browser with a cool tree view feature.
• Xwpe is an integrated development environment for C/C++ programming that contains an info reader. It's at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/.
• Rhide at http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~sho/rho/rhide/rhide.html is a popular Borland-like integrated development environment for GNU C/C++ and GNU Pascal running under Linux and DOS/Windows. It contains a nice pseudo-graphical (in the DOS style) info reader, which is also available standalone: InfView at http://members.xoom.com/stropea/infview.html. Includes bookmarks and full text search through all installed info files.
• Jed is a small and fast Emacs look-alike which also includes an info reader. It can be gotten from ftp://space.mit.edu/pub/davis/jed/. Works on Unix and Windows.
• Xinfo at ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/gnu/ is an old X-based info reader and rather buggy.
• Info2www at http://cgi.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Packages/stable/doc/info2www.html is a CGI script for converting info files on the fly to HTML and serving them over the WWW. Here's an example of how it looks.
• Texi2html at http://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/~obachman/Texi2html/ converts texinfo files to HTML. The output looks better than info2www's, but it needs to be stored permanently. The main disadvantage of converting texinfo to HTML is that you cannot do global searches in the resulting HTML tree and you cannot easily do index lookups.
• Makertf, available from several FTP sites, converts texinfo files to the RTF format common on Windows systems. The RTF format can be viewed with an RTF browser or converted to Windows-style .HLP files using the Windows Help Compiler which is available for download from Microsoft.
• INFNG, available via FTP, converts info (not texinfo) files to the Norton Guide format which is also common on Windows systems.
• OO-Browser is a powerful class browser and editor for object oriented languages. It comes with the editor XEmacs and includes a separate X-based program (xoobr) for tree views and stuff. OO-Browser can also be used as an innovative object-oriented info browser. Neat idea, but unfortunately still unusable for info file viewing.

Other Sources of Information

• The Texinfo Home page
• A long list of texinfo converters