tfm displays help information for the specified EMBOSS program.
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The table of command line arguments can be a bit difficult to read. This is the result of changing HTML Web pages to text.
You will see a page of documentation on the wossname program. To see further pages, you should press the SPACE bar on your keyboard. To stop seeing the documentation before you get to the end of the text, you can press the key q to quit.
The documentation for your own release is included as HTML pages in the EMBOSS distribution and may be available at your site. The same documentation is also available however through the program tfm as plain text. The documentation for all current and some past releases is provided by the developers at http://emboss.sourceforge.net/apps/. All EMBOSS programs should be adequately described. If you have problems understanding the function or usage of an EMBOSS program, then you should contact the EMBOSS mailing list (emboss@emboss.open-bio.org).
The unusual name of this program comes from the common computing science expression: RTFM. This acronym, as you probably already know, stands for Read The Fine* Manual; so this is The Fine* Manual. (* Insert the expletive of your choice here!)
Paged text output to the screentfm is unusual for an EMBOSS program in that it expects to be used interactively and so it displays the documentation text a page at a time, pausing after every page for the user to press the SPACE bar on their keyboard, i.e. it uses the UNIX program more to display the information. This behaviour can be turned off by using the qualifier -nomore.
The program more is a very standard way for text files to be displayed in UNIX. You might, however, prefer the text to be displayed using other programs, for example less (which has more functionality than more and is used by many people). The UNIX environment variable PAGER can be set to hold the name of your preferred program. If you have PAGER set, then tfm will use this specified program instead of using the default more program. (If you want tfm to use a specified program that is different to the normal PAGER program, then PAGER can be overriden by setting the environment variable EMBOSS_PAGER to hold the name of the program that should only be used to display text in tfm). PAGER can be set in UNIX with setenv PAGER less.To get help on more when using it to display text, press the ? key. To get help on less when using it to display text, press the h key.