[9579] in Athena Bugs
Re: rt 7.4G: help
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Craig)
Thu Jul 9 13:31:06 1992
To: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
From: Chris Craig <craig@ics.com>
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 09 Jul 92 01:09:54 -0400.
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 92 13:23:31 -0400
> What were you trying to do?
> View the 7.4 System Release notes using 'help'.
>
> What's wrong:
> They are virtually unreadable. The lines are too long, and it
> looks like the document needs to be run through nroff first.
>
>The document was written in LaTeX, which is unfortunately very
>difficult to convert to plain text. What you see when you read it on
>a non-X terminal is the output of dvi2tty, which is admittedly not all
>that great, but which can't be much improved upon. I will forward
>your report to the documentation group, but I don't think they're
>going to be able to do much about it.
In that case, the bug should be for dvi2tty. I now understand why the lines
are greater than 80 characters, but the extra formatting stuff? (That's why
I initially thought it was an nroff-type thing)
I would respectfully suggest that the doc group should keep in mind that not
everyone can use xdvi. In addition, xdvi is overkill for this type of
viewing. I'm not previewing a document, I'm trying to read it. Also, unless
I'm mistaken, a simple program such as 'more' has better paging and searching
capabilities than xdvi. It's certainly faster.
LaTeX is a fine and wonderful system, but there are still people trying to
read things in a terminal window :-)
Chris
craig@ics.com or crcraig@athena.mit.edu
