THANK YOU, JAN-HEIN!
(1) Emacs INFO tree
The library documentation is available in the format understood by the
Emacs INFO browser. For this you need to fetch the tar file
python-lib-info.tar from anonymous ftp site ftp.cwi.nl
[192.16.184.180], directory /pub.
The tar file contains 6 compressed info files which together comprise
the entire info tree for the library manual. You can go to the top of
the tree using the 'g' command in INFO mode, type g followed by
(python-lib), assuming the tar file has been extracted in the right
directory. Of course you can also edit your "localdir" file.
You don't need Emacs to browse INFO files: if you uncompress the
info files, they can also be browsed with the info browser written in
Python from the Python distribution's demo directory,
python/demo/stdwin/ibrowse/ib. (This requires that you have installed
the STDWIN extension to Python.)
(2) WWW hypertext
If you have a browser from CERN's WWW project (World-Wide Web, a
distributed hypertext system) you can browse a WWW hypertext version
of the manual by following the following link:
http://voorn.cwi.nl:2784/texinfo/python/top.html
If your name server doesn't know about voorn.cwi.nl, substitute
192.16.201.121. Try http://voorn.cwi.nl:2784/default.html to see
what other WWW documents are available from CWI -- I have converted
several other texinfo documents to WWW's format and made them
available, such as the Emacs manual.
It is possible that our Internet interface prohibits access to port
2784 on voorn.cwi.nl. In that case, you can try the following slower
but equivalent access path using ftp:
file://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/www/texinfo/python/top.html
Sources and binaries of WWW browsers can be ftp'ed from site
ftp.cern.ch, directory pub/www. Start extracting README.txt. The
Viola browser is quite worthwile (if you have X11).
I have also written a WWW browser in Python, but its displayer and
parser are rather slow compared to the C versions. If you're
interested in the texinfo-to-WWW conversion program (also in Python),
send me mail.
Next projects: converting the reference manual and the tutorial...
Cheers,
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@cwi.nl>
"Now, are you going to give me a fish licence?"