Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 21:32:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@apfel.de> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Compress handbook & FAQ Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970522212013.18722C-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <199705222252.AAA00880@campa.panke.de>
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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 <wosch@apfel.de> http://www.apfel.de/~wosch/ >
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