Customizing Line Mode Browser

Customizing Line Mode Browser's behavior is done with environment variables or their equivalent depending on the platform. "Environment variable" is a Unix term. On VMS you should use a logical name.

A list of things you can customize with environment variables (or local equivalents) is described below. The Line Mode Browser can furthermore be set up to use either a proxy server or a gateway.

WWW_HOME

The address of the first document to start with if you run www without a document name on the command line. For example, you can set it to

	http://www.w3.org

if you want to always use the home page on the W3C welcome page.

If no WWW_HOME variable is set the Line Mode Browser then it automaticly tries the following locations:

1. ~/WWW/default.html
2. /usr/local/lib/WWW/default.html
3. http://www.w3.org/default.html

If you are installing www without privileges, you may not be able to install the home page, and so you will have to set WWW_HOME to point to a local copy of the file, or to our server.

You can customize www to start at a page of your choice. You can write your own page, or use someone else's. All you have to do is to set the environment variable WWW_HOME to the www address of your preferred home page. (When you are using www, you can see what an address looks like by typing help when you are reading a document - it tells you the address of that node).

WWW_CONFIG

If defined, must be the name of a local file which contains configuration information including rules, presentation recipes, etc. If configuration files are also specified using the -r option, they are loaded first.

NNTPSERVER

See how to set up a news server's address for the Line Mode Browser and why you can't use other sites' newsserver.

WWW_PRINT_COMMAND

Unix only. A quoted printf-style format string for the system command you wish to invoke with the www PRINT command. This should contain one %s marker where www should put the name of the document to be printed. The default is

	www -n -na -p66 '%s' | lpr

(The single quotes around the %s are necessary in case the address contains shell metacharacters.) When you define this variable, you may of course have to enclose the whole thing in double quotes, e.g.

	setenv WWW_PRINT_COMMAND "www -n -na -p66 '%s' | lpr"