TixInfo 1.4

TixInfo is a tk script to read GNU "info" files and display them. TixInfo can be used stand alone (via WISH), or embedded within an application to provide integrated, on-line help. It runs on every system that supports Tcl/Tk/Tix.

Info files provide a robust hyper-text capability that is ideal for on-line help. The format is suitable for both tty-based systems and graphical systems. In addition, the same document source can produce both a nice hardcopy manual and Info files. Note that most GNU software is documented in this way (via texinfo). Info files usually reside in a directory /usr/info or /usr/local/info or /usr/local/gnu/info or similar. Other info readers are xinfo (old), info (text-based), and the info mode of the editor (X-)Emacs. It is also possible to serve info files on the WWW with info2www or to convert their texinfo source to HTML with texi2html. Info versions of the Python documentation can be found at http://www.python.org/doc/.

What is required to run it?

TixInfo requires Tix 8.1.3 or later from http://tix.sourceforge.net, and has been tested under Linux and Windows.

The "Manual" and "Apropos" functions of TixInfo require tkman to be installed on your system. It is a browser for Unix manual pages. TixInfo works perfectly fine without TkMan, but you do want this program, believe me. It's at ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/ and you need to fetch both tkman and rman. In order for TixInfo to be able to communicate with TkMan, you have to use a secure X server, which is easiest accomplished by running xdm.

Download

Download Tixinspect from http://tix.sourceforge.net/Tixapps/.

How to install it?

Tixinfo uses the environment variable INFOPATH (a colon-separated list of directories) and INFOSUFFIX (a colon-separated list of suffixes) to locate info files. The defaults used if either of these variables is not set are defined in the procedure tkiInit() in the variable defInfoPath. You can either set your environment variables appropriately, pass directories on the commandline with "-dir", or edit the defaults in defInfoPath once and for all for your site. For faster startup, don't include more directories than necessary in that variable. For information about how to customize the appearance of tixinfo, start the program, hit "h" and choose the "Customization" entry. That same information is also present at the top of the tixinfo script itself.

Any specific information for Windows users?

You will probably want to start tixinfo in the following way: 
	tixwish8183.exe \wherever\Tixapps.tcl tixinfo -dir \your\infodir
where all your info files are stored in the directory \your\infodir. Once inside the program, all paths should be given to tixinfo in the unix notation with "/" as separator. If you transport info files to your Windows machine, make sure that the long filenames survive intact, or else many links won't work. You probably don't have a middle mouse button; in order to display a node in a new window, you can use the undocumented "Shift-Click" on the link.

Support

No support for Tixinfo is available at this time.

For bug reports or patches, please consult the Tixapps User's Forum.

Who wrote it?