Printing Info Pages
 

When I want to print out documentation, I usually find myself going to the package's website and hoping there is a nice HTML or PDF file out there I can print, but when worst comes to worse I find myself copying and pasting from the info file into a text editor and printing it out


Please tell me there is a better way!

Thanks a Mucho

You can use command line:

info foo | lpr
info foo | lprint

See for more info http://blogs.cyberciti.biz/hm/index....nd-info-pages/

One option is to install the source package. This will give you access to the topic.tex source.
For example:
rpm -Uhv core-utils-<version>.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/packages/SPECS # The "packages" part may be different on your system.
rpmbuild -bp core-utils.spec # This may apply patches to the document sources
cd ../BUILD
cd core-utils-<version>/
./configure
# There may by targets to produce the documentation such as
make dvi
or
make ps
or make pdf

As a last resort, cd to the "doc" subdirectory, and if a core-utils.tex file exists:
tex core-utils.tex

This will produce a .dvi file which you can print out from kdvi or xdvi, or you could use dvips to convert it to postscript.

This may seem like a lot of work, but will become routine after a few times. The documents produced look very good. Also, many of the documents you will discover this way are lengthy manuals. The bashref, and core-utils manual s are long enough to fill a 3 ring binder. Having them nicely typeset makes using them easier.

Also consider printing out man pages this way:
man -t <topic> | lp -d <printername>

You might want to preview an example this way:
man -t tar | gv -scale 2 -antialias -media letter -

To print man pages:
In this example, using tar man pages.

man -t tar | lpr -Pdraft

Print man pages for tar (will be formatted by troff or groff,
usually for PostScript)
Pipe to lpr
Send to printer <draft> [optional]. The command will
print to the default printer if given as:
man -t tar | lpr

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To print info pages:
In this example, using tar info pages.

cp /usr/share/info/tar.info.gz /home/<user>

Copy the info page to another location to avoid breaking
your on-line documentation.

gunzip /home/<user>/tar.info.gz

After decompressing the file, use a2ps to convert to PostScript.

a2ps tar.info

This produces a PostScript formatted file called tar.info.
Open in your favorite editor and print from there.

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To convert output to PDF format

man -t tar | ps2pdf > tar.pdf

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I've tried info2html and didn't like the result.