Re: instant printing

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "David L. Nicol" <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 15:36:16 -0500
> 
> I want to print out the info for tar.  How do I prepare a
> printable from an installed info system?

You can't.  Info cannot produce a printed output because it works on
plain ASCII version of the docs, where all the font and typesetting
information is gone.  (You have a print-node command in Info, but
that's not what you want, I think.)

To get a printed version of the docs, you need to start with the
Texinfo sources of it: that's the file(s) with .texi or .texinfo
extension.  They are part of the source distribution of each package.

> The insistence of
> the texinfo info pages that this is possible is currently
> a most annoying tease since there does not appear to be
> an idiot's command line invocation example included of
> how to do it.
> 
> Ideally, something like
> 
> info -export=ps tar | lpr
> 
> will give me my nice book.

Normally, in the Makefile's which come with the source distribution,
there should be a special target for producing a DVI file.  Something
like "make tar.dvi", in this case.  Or maybe even "make tar.ps".
Failing that, you should be able to chdir to the directory where the
*.texi files live, and then type these commands:

       texi2dvi tar.texi
       dvips tar.dvi

You will need TeX and DviPS programs to be installed, for this to
work.