In previous sections we have concentrated on how to write hypertext documents and organise them into an inter-linked documentation set. In this section, we turn our attention to accessing those parts of the documentation set that we want to read.
The simplest form of document access is provided by the showme command, which simply displays
the document you name. For instance:
would display the “top” page of the document called “sun188” (i.e. the one you are reading now). Using this command is normally easier than entering a full URL for the document.
The showme command displays the document using a WWW browser and will make use of one you
already have running if possible. You can specify which browser to use, if required (see
§B.1).
If you do not give any directory information, showme will search for the document using the HTX_PATH
search path (see §2.3), but you can specify explicitly where the document is if you prefer, as
in:
If showme cannot find the document locally, it will try and fetch it from the remote document server
instead(see §6). You can suppress this behavior using the -l switch if you prefer:
in which case failure to find the document locally will simply result in an error. You can also specify
that a remote copy of the document is required using the -r switch, in which case any
local copy will be ignored and the remote document server will be asked to supply the
document.
The showme command also allows you to read selected parts of documents, specified using the
cross-reference labels they contain(see §3.1). To do this, you simply add the label as an extra argument.
Thus:
will display the description of the hlink command in this document.
Using this feature requires that you know the names of the cross-reference labels present in the document, or at least requires that they be easily guessable. If this is not the case, you may prefer to select which parts of documents to view by means of a document search instead(see §8).