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rep_nop

Member

From: Portland, OR

Registered: 2011-12-28

Posts: 3

Website

GNU .info to PDF

I would be extremely interested in a better solution to reading .info files.

This was previously unresolved here and I believe replying there would constitute a necrobump. pinfo is okay but having a linked PDF would really be nice.

I assume this is hard or impossible since information is probably lost when converted to .info. f no solution exists, is there any feasible/automated way to get to the .texi files for all my installed packages?

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: GNU .info to PDF

http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/man … utput.html
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ … texi-files

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

Website

Re: GNU .info to PDF

Karol, that was not really the question.  Generating pdfs from texi files is easy - but can one generate a pdf from the info file (or revert back to texi from info) as the texi files are not distributed with binary packages.  The texi file can be retrieved from abs, but doing this for every packages that has an info file would be a real hassle.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: GNU .info to PDF

Most, perhaps all(?) of the GNU .info manuals can be downloaded from gnu.org as pdfs: http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html

rep_nop

Member

From: Portland, OR

Registered: 2011-12-28

Posts: 3

Website

Re: GNU .info to PDF

The GNU only thing is probably not a huge limitation. Realistically most projects I need info pages for are GNU projects, and if I could have all of those, I'd be well enough.

However, I often work several hours a week without internet access, and I don't always know which docs I will need ahead of time. Trying to manually get them all is both error prone and time consuming. Given that it seems the .info->pdf isn't going to happen, are there any clever ideas for automating getting the .texi or .pdf manuals?

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: GNU .info to PDF

My alternative:
I use vimpager as my $PAGER and have less aliased to vimpager. Then I pipe the info command into less to give me my familiar keyboard shortcuts: info bash | less.  I give up the hyperlinks that info and pinfo have, but text searches and using marks give me adequate navigation.

jakobcreutzfeldt

Member

Registered: 2011-05-12

Posts: 1,042

Re: GNU .info to PDF

My alternative:
I use vimpager as my $PAGER and have less aliased to vimpager. Then I pipe the info command into less to give me my familiar keyboard shortcuts: info bash | less.  I give up the hyperlinks that info and pinfo have, but text searches and using marks give me adequate navigation.

You know the info reader has vi keybindings, right?

$ info --vi-keys info

Or, if you're in a graphical environment and you have GTK installed, Emacs' info reader is superior to the terminal one.  You can make a shell function something like this to launch it:

function info () {
    emacs -Q --eval "(progn (info \"$1\") (vi-mode))"
}

Last edited by jakobcreutzfeldt (2014-11-12 18:03:35)

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: GNU .info to PDF

You know the info reader has vi keybindings, right?

Thank you, yes, I am aware of the vi keybindings and have previously tried them. I am much happier using vimpager rather than using the info reader.