Howto in .gz format?!??!

Hi there! I've installed on my SuSE8.1 machine the packages susehelp, howto and so on, I've activated it from the /etc/sysconfig/susehelp and I get all the howto's in ".gz" format... (at http://localhost/usr/share/doc/howto/en/) ...how can I get them in plain text? And also, the indexing works just fine on the "SuSE Help Center", but the not all the results/links could be displayed... any hints? Thank you very much. Radu