[tex-k] pdftex.1.gz: --help has basic info that man page lacks

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon Sep 27 18:20:36 CEST 2004


    The output of pdftex --help suggests this (more general?) address, 

FYI, the --help output in the current release of pdftex says
pdftex at tug.org.

    > The complete documentation for this version of TeX can be found in the
    > Info manual Web2C: A TeX implementation.

web2c.texinfo discusses cmdline options and such, but has nothing about
pdftex specifically.  It would be good to mention the actual pdftex
manual, which is (gasp) real documentation on the new primitives, etc.

    The help message with its uppercase arguments is probably from one of
    Knuth's files, isn't it?

Knuth?  No.  I originally wrote all those --help messages (and
implemented --help in the first place) for Web2c, back in the early 90's
or so.  Knuth's code predates --help by a good many years, and anyway
doesn't attempt to process the command line.

Best,
karl



More information about the tex-k mailing list