windvi 0.54

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:

> Perhaps the problem is that such programs are rather independent from TeX 
> stuff and already present on Unix but hardly rare on win32.

IMHO, you cannot distribute a package without a means to read the 
documentation of that package.  Since non-Unix platforms don't have man 
and Info installed by default, they should be IMHO part of TeXLive.  (The 
DJGPP ports on the last TeXLive actually included these programs, and I 
put them there exactly for this reason.)

> I saw some man clones, but if you try to read unformated man pages
> you need moreover groff etc.

Firts, you can format all the man pages before you put them on the CD, 
and then Groff is not needed.

And second, what's the problem to port Groff?  It is already ported to 
DJGPP, so either running the DJGPP version (will run on Windows as well) 
or compiling the ported sources with a Win32 compiler should be an easy 
task.

> Can your man read such pages?

Yes, but it calls Groff when it finds an unformatted page.

> Can binaries be available -- I have no win32 compiler.

Me neither; I work with DJGPP.  If you work on Windows 9X, just grab the 
DJGPP binaries (URLs below) and never look back.  If your platform is NT, 
then they will work there as well, but DJGPP programs cannot use long 
file names on NT, only on Windows 9X, so you will be much better off 
recompiling them.

The DJGPP port of Groff is available from SimTel.NET mirrors:

  ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gro110b.zip

and here's my `man' clone:

  ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2apps/man12b.zip

You will also need a port of GNU Less:

  ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/lss332b.zip

Here are several SimTel mirrors close to you:

Krakow, Poland:
     ftp.cyf-kr.edu.pl, directory /pub/mirror/Simtel.Net/gnu/djgpp

Warsaw, Poland:
     ftp.icm.edu.pl, directory /pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp

Poznan, Poland:
     ftp.man.poznan.pl, directory /pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp