Info Pages in Font

Paint USS Code 39 in Font Info Pages

Man pages date from the days of relatively primitive computers. Back then, most computers could only display page after page of text, and allow the user to scroll through it. In addition, memory and disk space were scarce, which is why some man pages are incredibly concise fewer words take up less memory! The Texinfo system is a valiant by the GNU Project attempt to overcome the shortfalls of man pages. Often, this is referred to as info, because that s the command used to summon Texinfo pages (normally, you type info command). For starters, info pages are more verbose than the equivalent man pages, and that gives the author more space to explain the command or software. This doesn t necessarily mean that info pages are easier to understand, but there s a better chance of that being the case. Secondly, info pages contain hyperlinks, just like web pages. If you move the cursor over a hyperlinked word, which is usually indicated by an asterisk (*), you can proceed to a related page. In a similar sense, pages are linked together so that you can move back and forth from topic to topic. The bad news is that the man page system is far more popular and established than Texinfo. If a programmer creates a new application, for example, it s unlikely he ll bother with an info page, but he will almost certainly produce a man page. In fact, in many cases, typing info command will simply bring up the man page, except in the software used to browse info pages. However, nearly all the GNU tools are documented using info pages, either in their own pages or as part of the coreutils pages. For example, to read about the cp command and how to use it, you can type this: info coreutils cp To browse through all sections of the coreutils pages, type this: info coreutils Because man pages are so established, everyone expects to find one for every utility. So most utilities that have info pages will also have man pages. But in such a case, the man page will state near the end that the main documentation for the utility is contained in an info page and you may find it more fruitful to use that instead. Navigating through info pages is achieved via the keyboard and is something of an art. But, as you might expect, there s a user-friendly guide to using info: just type info info. Remember that words preceded with an asterisk are hyperlinks, and you can jump from link to link using the Tab key.

Some programs come with their own documentation. This is designed to give users the information they need to get started with the program (as opposed to the man page, which is a concise and complete guide to the software). Alternatively, program documentation sometimes gives a brief outline of the program s features. The files are usually simple text, so they can be read in any text editor or word processor, and are normally called README. Under Ubuntu, these documents are usually stored in a programspecific directory within /usr/share/doc (although a small minority of programs use /usr/doc). Not all programs are friendly enough to provide such documentation, but even so, you ll still find a directory for the software in /usr/share/doc. This is because the software might also come with a getting started guide written by the Ubuntu package maintainer. Such guides detail specifics of using the software under Ubuntu, such as where configuration files are located or how the program interoperates with other software on the system. Sometimes, this documentation is written by a Debian package maintainer because nearly all Ubuntu software has its origins in the Debian project (www.debian.org). In addition, the directory will probably contain copyright information, explaining the software license used by the software, as well as a CHANGELOG, which is a text file listing features that have been added to each release of the software. The directory might contain some other files, too, detailing where to send information about bugs, for example. Viewing the README documentation is easy. For example, for the Gedit text editor, you could type this: cd /usr/share/doc/gedit less README Sometimes, the README documentation is in a compressed tarball, in which case it will have either a .tar.gz or a .tar.bz2 file extension. However, less is clever enough to realize this and extract the document for reading.