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1. Getting Started

If installed correctly, starting Emacs/W3 is quite painless. Just type M-x w3 in a running Emacs session. This will retrieve the default page that has been configured -- by default the documentation for Emacs/W3 at Indiana University. The default homepage is specified by the w3-default-homepage variable.

If the default page is not retrieved correctly at startup, you will have to do some customization.

Once started, you can use the mouse and the menu or use the following key commands (for more commands and more detail, see section Basic Usage).

move forward
press the space bar,

move backwards
press the backspace key,

move to the next HTML reference on the page
press the TAB key,

move to the previous HTML reference on the page
press the SHIFT and TAB keys at the same time. If this does not work (some text terminals cannot distinguish between TAB and SHIFT-TAB, pressing the ALT and TAB keys should also work.

follow a link
put the cursor over it and press the RETURN key, or
click the left mouse button on it,

fetch a URL
press the Control and o keys at the same time,
type the URL, and then press the RETURN key,

return to the last URL you were at
press the l key,

quit W3 mode
press the q key.

1.1 Downloading  Where to download Emacs/W3.
1.2 Building and Installing  Compiling and installing from source.
1.3 Startup Files  What is where, and why.

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1.1 Downloading

Emacs/W3 will work with Emacs 19.29 and later and XEmacs 19.14 and later, but if you're using a 19.x Emacs then you will need to get the latest custom and widget libraries.

Emacs
Available from the GNU archive ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu or one of it's many mirrors.

XEmacs
Available from the XEmacs archive http://www.xemacs.org/ or one of it's many mirrors.

Emacs/W3
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/docs.html is the main distribution point for Emacs/W3.

Emacspeak
A speech synthesizer package for Emacs and XEmacs. More information is available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/emacspeak/

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1.2 Building and Installing

Emacs/W3 uses GNU `configure' (@xref{Top, , ,configure}) to control installation. configure will attempt to find what version of Emacs you have and where it is installed. If it finds both Emacs and XEmacs, then XEmacs is used (but see below for how to change this). Apart from the usual options, the following options are accepted:

`--with-xemacs'
Use XEmacs.
`--with-emacs'
Use Emacs.
`--with-lispdir=dir'
Put lisp files (*.el and *.elc) in dir. If this is not specified, and neither is `--with-package-dir', then the lisp files go into `EMACS/site-lisp'.
`--with-package-dir=dir'
If using XEmacs, install Emacs/W3 as a package in dir. Please note that this and the `--prefix' argument are mutually exclusive.
`--with-makeinfo=makeinfo'
Use makeinfo to build info files from Texinfo files. `configure' will normally find makeinfo if it's available, you should only need to specify this if it's not called makeinfo or if it isn't in a directory in your `PATH'.
`--with-custom=dir'
Use the custom package in dir. `configure' will attempt to find a suitable custom package, you should not need to specify this yourself if the custom package is in Emacs's load-path.
`--enable-site-install'
Install Emacs/W3 for the site, rather than just yourself. This only affects whether `make dotemacs' affects `~/.emacs' or `site-lisp/default.el'.

These are the most useful of the normal `configure' options.

`--prefix=dir'
This is the top level directory and by default everything is installed somewhere below this. This is `/usr/local' by default.
`--infodir=dir'
Where to put the info files. This is `prefix/info' by default.
`--data-dir=dir'
Where to put date files (default stylesheets). This is `prefix/share' by default unless `--with-package-dir=pack-dir' was given in which case they go into `pack-dir/etc/w3'.

The directory that the byte-compiled lisp files will be installed into is controlled by the `--prefix', `--with-package-dir' and `--with-lispdir' options. The directory for the info and data files is likewise controlled by the `--prefix', `--with-package-dir' and `--infodir' or `--data-dir' options.

Normally these are the only things that need to be installed, they can by compiled by `make all', or `make w3' and `make info'. `make install' will install the lisp, info and data files. `make all' in the `texi' directory will create the info files and also dvi files. HTML and postscript can be generated by `make html' and `make ps' respectively.

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1.3 Startup Files

Emacs/W3 needs a directory for each user to store options, history and the cache. w3-configuration-directory controls this directory, which is `~/.w3' by default.

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1.3.1 Emacs/W3 profile

Emacs/W3 keeps a file called `profile' in your configuration directory that sets many variables. Warning: this file will overide any options that you set in your `.emacs'. You must either edit `profile' directly or use w3-menu-save-options to save your settings.

If you prefer, you can set w3-default-configuration-file to specify a different configuration file. This file does not need to be dedicated to Emacs/W3 because Emacs/W3 will delimit its part of the file so you can set this to `.emacs' if you want. However, while Emacs/W3 will save it's options to the correct part of the file, it will read (and execute) the entire file when starting.

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1.3.2 Default stylesheets

Emacs/W3 will look for style-sheets in w3-configuration-directory as well as the site-wide directories. In particular it will look for `dark.css' or `stylesheet-dark' if you're using a dark background and `light.css' or `stylesheet-light' if you're using a light background as well as `stylesheet' and `default.css'. If w3-default-stylesheet is not nil then the file that it names will be used as well. For more information, See section 4. Stylesheets.

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1.3.3 History

Emacs/W3 keeps a file called `history' in the configuration directory. This is a list of all the links you have visited. You can change the file where the history is stored by setting url-global-history-file to the name of the file you'd prefer. See section 3.7 Global History.

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1.3.4 Hotlists

Hotlists (sometimes called bookmarks, but not to be confused with Emacs's bookmarks) are a list of URLs. Emacs/W3 supports mosaic's hotlist format which associates an alias with each URL --- See section 3.5 Hotlist Handling. The w3-hotlist-file variable specifies the hotlist file. It defaults to `.mosaic-hotlist-default'.

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This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.