elegant way to read gzipped documentation?

[kai12]

hi,

a lot of the docs in my debian install come in compressed format
(gzipped pdf and dvi files). right now i use sudo to unzip them before
opening in a viewer.

this seem awkward for a number of reasons (superuser powers should not
be necessary to read docs, the document is left uncompressed wasting
space and i don't know if other apps expect a .gz file instead of the uncompressed
file, finally i'd prefer a one step approach).

is there a default or non-akward way of reading the docs? ideally this would
uncompress the doc on the fly leaving the original untouched but work with
one command or pipeline.

cheers, kai

[i92guboj]

hi,

a lot of the docs in my debian install come in compressed format
(gzipped pdf and dvi files). right now i use sudo to unzip them before
opening in a viewer.

this seem awkward for a number of reasons (superuser powers should not
be necessary to read docs, the document is left uncompressed wasting
space and i don't know if other apps expect a .gz file instead of the uncompressed
file, finally i'd prefer a one step approach).

is there a default or non-akward way of reading the docs? ideally this would
uncompress the doc on the fly leaving the original untouched but work with
one command or pipeline.

cheers, kai

zcat, bzcat, zless and bzless will probably be of use to you.

[kai12]

zcat, bzcat, zless and bzless will probably be of use to you.

hi + thanks for the reply!

it would work, too, if there was a pdf/dvi viewer that read from stdin, but evince, gv, acroread don't.
or is any way other than going:

zcat somefile.pdf.gz | viewerapp -

?

kai

[kai12]

here is an update to my question:

i just stumbled upon xdvizilla. from the man page:

xdvizilla was written to look at files and decompress them correctly (depending on their file types).

this is exactly what i was looking for, running

xdvizilla example.dvi.gz

will show example.dvi in xdvi.

alas it's restricted to .dvi files only - there are plenty of .pdf.gz and .ps.gz on my system.
so i'm still looking for tools to handle those conviniently.

cheers, kai

[bigtomrodney]

hi,

a lot of the docs in my debian install come in compressed format
(gzipped pdf and dvi files). right now i use sudo to unzip them before
opening in a viewer.

Why would you need root access to unzip a file?! The short answer is you don't. I know Evince supports DVI, as you've mentioned above. Have you tried opening the files directly using it? It does have some support for compression as far as I am aware.

[kai12]

Why would you need root access to unzip a file?!

It's true, I don't. I was thinking of unzipping the file in place (which is
default behavior for gzip) but, of course, with read privilegdes every
user can make a local (unzipped) copy. I'd rather not duplicate the
docs though.

The short answer is you don't. I know Evince supports DVI, as you've mentioned above. Have you tried opening the files directly using it? It does have some support for compression as far as I am aware.

I tried evince on a .pdf.gz. It raised an error:
"Unable to open document - Unhandled MIME type: 'application/x-gzip'"
and the file was not opened.

Is there somethink I can do to enable evince to handle this in a better way?

I keep thinking that there has to be a clever simple way.
kai

[bigtomrodney]

Just googling I found this thread on launchpad -

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...138/comments/4

I can't speak for xpdf (which I don't have around), but evince certainly does, as well as compressed DVI and PS.

I'm not sure how to do it but it would seem the support is there

EDIT - Actually that is contradicted further down. I'm going to read more into this.

[kai12]

thanks, that was helpful.

it seems that this behavior of evince (to not open compressed files)
has been fixed, and it's just my stable Debian system which features an
old version 0.4.0 (testing, for example, has 2.22.2) of evince.

i guess i'll be waiting for lenny to become stable later on this year.

cheer, kai

PS
in the meantime, i'll work around using a script like this:

#!/bin/sh
# wrapper for evince to open compressed (gzipped) content

TMPFILE=`mktemp -p /tmp zevince.XXXX`

zcat "$1" > $TMPFILE
evince $TMPFILE
rm $TMPFILE

[i92guboj]

My guess is that mc should be able to access all these archive types, then with the correct file association you should be able to view the contents.

Same for konqueror, provided you have the relevant kio-slaves installed (konqueror should even be able to embed the tools used to display the files, if they are based on kparts).