[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

[Frank Küster]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

>     Hm, the current texdoc shell script works with .gz and .bz2.  In terms
>     of easy programming and maintainability, I think it would only be an
>     advantage if we either decide to not support bzip2 (and 7zip in the
>     future), or include those, too (which is probably not as easy).
>
> If I'm understanding correctly, I see no overriding reason to support
> .bz2'd documents in TL.
>
> Right now, I see no .pdf.gz's in the hierarchy, only a few .ps.gz's, and
> just one obscure bz2'd that isn't even installed:
> Build/source/texk/windvi/Examples/ws_bzip2.ps.bz2
>
> Am I missing some whole group of files?

Rather a group of users, those who change TeX Live.  For example, Debian
usually installs documentation files gzipped, and we have done this with
teTeX and now with TeXLive.  Well, for PDF files we recently stopped
doing that (because you then need texdoc, neither xpdf nor acroread can
uncompress on-the-fly, and because gzip compression is not impressive on
internally compressed PDF files), but dvi and ps are consequently
compressed.  

I don't know about other re-distributors.

Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to make xpdf a wrapper which detects
the .gz (or bz2) extension and decompresses on-the-fly, and that might
save valuable space on the live DVD.

One thing to consider for future development is the following: If we
stick to PDF as the main documentation format, we probably want more
efficient compression methods than gz, but ideally the PDF files should
not be internally compressed for smallest end sizes[1].  For DVI (and I tend
to agree with David Kastrup's ceterum censeo about using DVI with source
specials) some test files don't give a lot of difference between gz and
bz2, and 7zip isn't much better:

$ lh labsem.dvi*
-rw-r--r-- 1 frank frank  15K 2007-06-26 08:51 labsem.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 frank frank 6.4K 2007-06-26 08:51 labsem.dvi.7z
-rw-r--r-- 1 frank frank 6.6K 2007-06-26 08:46 labsem.dvi.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 frank frank 6.7K 2007-06-26 08:46 labsem.dvi.gz

Regards, Frank



[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.general/100253/match=gz+bz2+compress+ratio
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)