From owner-freebsd-doc Thu May 22 21:32:32 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id VAA29418 for doc-outgoing; Thu, 22 May 1997 21:32:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from andrsn.stanford.edu (root@andrsn.Stanford.EDU [36.33.0.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id VAA29412 for ; Thu, 22 May 1997 21:32:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (andrsn@localhost.Stanford.EDU [127.0.0.1]) by andrsn.stanford.edu (8.8.5/8.6.12) with SMTP id VAA18756; Thu, 22 May 1997 21:32:24 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 21:32:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson To: Wolfram Schneider cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Compress handbook & FAQ In-Reply-To: <199705222252.AAA00880@campa.panke.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-doc@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 23 May 1997, Wolfram Schneider wrote: > Annelise Anderson writes: > >> I think we should commpress the handbook and the FAQ > >> by default. Comments? > > > >As one who came to FreeBSD without knowing unix not so long ago, I > >think the basic documents should be available (both on the hard drive > >and on www.freebsd.org) in uncompressed plain text. > > Currently we ship the handbook in ascii *and* latin1 format. > handbook.latin1 and handbook.ascii are more or less equal and this > waste 1MB hard disk. I vote for killing the latin version, because > latin1 seems still a problem for DOS/russian users. I don't think there's an ascii version on my 2.2.1 cd, but maybe I missed it--or it's compressed. > > > >Last time I looked, www.freebsd.org claims to offer the handbook and > >FAQ in plain text, but it does not. > > ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.ORG/pub/FreeBSD/docs > > If the ^H is a problem, you can easy remove the ^H with perl > > perl -npe 's/.\010//g' < handbook.ascii Isn't it really preposterous to offer nifty little perl scripts to people who are downloading the handbook in ascii because they're thinking of (possibly) installing it? Anyway, I think handbook.ascii has already had the ^H removed, and instead there are just multiple letters and the t_e_x_t stuff. One way to get a readable version is to use the postscript version, convert it with ps2ascii, run it through col -b, use fmt on it, and then (in the event your display isn't iso-8859-1), do some global substitutions so that hyphens don't look like upside-down-exclamation points and the centered dots used to mark paragraphs don't look like box-drawing characters. Is that really what users should have to do? I don't know of an iso-8859-1 code page for dos (or Windows 3.1-- there may be one for Windows 95). The 850 codepage (the European and French Canadian default) is closer than the U.S. default (codepage 437) but not really compliant--and pretty nasty to install. So I'd agree with getting rid of the latin1 version. Annelise > > -- > Wolfram Schneider http://www.apfel.de/~wosch/ >