Bug 2963

Summary:	Feature request: XFree86-doc as ascii
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	ak
Component:	XFree86	Assignee:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.0
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-06-08 16:14:50 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description ak 1999-05-22 12:30:32 UTC

It is very cool that RedHat finally ships the X11
documentation in XFree86-doc. Thanks :)

But unfortunately it is shipped in .ps, which makes it waste
a lot of disk space and is hard to grep. With a small
Makefile tweak (sorry no patch because I won't download the
source rpm just for that now) the groff -Tps could be
changed to groff -Tascii and ASCII versions of the
documentation could be generated. I would only ship the
.txt versions to save disk space. If you really think
.ps is still needed a .pdf version may be more appropiate
(via ghostscript ps2pdf, I think requiring gs to rebuild the
srpm is not unreasonable)

This has several advantages:
- It can be linked from some page in the web
browser/gnome-help (I think that would help newbie X11
developers a lot and would lower support load in linux
newsgroups)
- It saves disk space
- It can be searched easily unlike .ps

I think with a minimal change RH could be made more
developer friendly here.

Comment 1 Jay Turner 1999-05-24 19:27:59 UTC

This request has been forwarded to a developer for future releases.

Comment 2 Preston Brown 1999-06-08 16:14:59 UTC

This is currently impossible because the documentation is distributed
as PostScript and FrameMaker source.  We don't have the means to
convert the FrameMaker files to ASCII, so PostScript is the best we
can do.

------- Email Received From  Andi Kleen <ak> 06/08/99 14:47 -------