Homepage: http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/rfcview.el
Author: Neil W. Van Dyke
Updated:
View IETF RFCs with readability-improved formatting
Introduction:
For historical reasons, IETF Internet RFCs are required to be in a plain
ASCII text format that's best-suited for sending directly to a 6-lpi
US-letter-size printer. This makes them suboptimal for viewing on-screen,
as you will be doing for countless hours if you're ever doing network
programming to one of them. Fortunately, the ASCII format is usually
close to what you, the Emacs zealot, *truly* want -- which is a format
suited to more pleasurably viewing the RFC in Emacs.
The `rfcview' package uses Emacs overlays to add some fontification and
hide the page headers and footers (which it replaces with one-line page
number references that look like "(p.1)", right-justified). The file is
never modified, and you can see the raw ASCII text by pressing `t'.
System Requirements:
The `rfcview.el' package was first written using FSF GNU Emacs 20.7 on a
GNU/Linux system, and is now maintained under Emacs 21.4. It should work
with recent Emacs versions on Unix variants. `rfcview.el' has not yet
been tested with the XEmacs fork of Emacs, and I'd welcome any necessary
patches.
Installation:
1. Put this `rfcview.el' file somewhere in your Emacs Lisp load path.
2. Add the following lines to your `~/.emacs' file:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
'("/\\(rfc\\|std\\)[0-9]+\\.txt\\'" . rfcview-mode))
(autoload 'rfcview-mode "rfcview" nil t)
The next time you visit an RFC file, it should be
displayed prettily using `rfcview-mode'. (Do this before turning
on `auto-compression-mode', so that the `.gz' extension comes before
`.txt' in `auto-mode-alist'; then compressed RFCs will work too.)
4. Optionally, do `M-x rfcview-customize RET' to customize the mode
options.
Things for the Author to Someday Do (but Probably Not):
* RFC 1700 (STD 2) has unnumbered headings and column-zero body text. We
don't try to cope right now, but we might assume, e.g., that lines in
all-caps with preceding and succeeding blank lines are headings.
* Hide extraneous blank lines.
* Handle "Table of Contents" heading centered, such as in RFC 1035 and RFC
1157.
* Display bibliographic references in other-window
vertically-sized to fit only the reference (or min window height).
* Download RFCs on demand, and cache them. Probably integrate one of the
existing one or two packages that do this.
* Make an RFCedit mode.
* Handle multi-line heading like:
19.6.1.1 Changes to Simplify Multi-homed Web Servers and Conserve IP
Addresses
* Have a stack for (internal) hyperlinks a la Info.
* Deal with an index (e.g. RFC 3986).