dtinfo
More info
- Owner
- The Open Group
- Released
- Type
- Documentation browser
CDE's Information Manager of 1997: an SGML-based reader for whole manuals with full-text search, bookmarks and annotations, the big sibling of the dthelp help system that almost nobody got round to using.
dthelp, CDE's help system, was built for short topics attached to a button or a dialog. For book-length manuals The Open Group brought a different technology into CDE 2.1 (1997), the OLIAS browser from HAL Computer Systems, Fujitsu's American subsidiary, and renamed it dtinfo, the Information Manager. Documents were written in SGML to a DocBook variant, compiled with dtdocbook into indexed infolibs, and displayed in a window with a bookshelf, a table-of-contents tree, full-text search across the whole collection, bookmarks and the user's own notes, all in Motif grey. Solaris and HP-UX shipped their manuals in the format, and that is where it was actually read.
The timing was poor. By 1997 the web browser had already become the natural manual reader, and HTML needed no compilation step. When CDE was released as free software in 2012, dtinfo came along as a large mass of C++ with its own build chain that nobody wanted to maintain, and it was dropped from the project a few years later. That makes dtinfo one of the few CDE programs that is harder to get hold of today than it was in the nineties.