[tex-live] texdoc can't find texmf.cnf

Manuel Pegourie-Gonnard mpg at elzevir.fr
Mon Jun 23 14:56:54 CEST 2008


David Kastrup a écrit :
> The viewer is an order of magnitude faster 

I agree on this point, but...

> and offers instantaneous
> looking class functions and rulers for fine layout control.

Is this useful for documentation?  And by the way, this could be integrated
in a good pdf viewer.  (Eg, the pdf viewer from TeXshop and the viewer in
TeXworks have a looking glass feature...)

> It
> integrates with editors via Source Specials (meaning that one could
> visit .dtx files at the right line with a click in the DVI file,
> something which would be _very_ handy for source2e.dvi, for example).

Source specials will soon be available in pdf too.

> This is not a matter of "just because we could".  It's usability.

Another important thing is accessibility.  PDF is more accessible to most
people than dvi.

> In
> contrast to the PDF files, however, the DVI files should not be checked
> into the Build tree, but rather built from .dtx fresh.  That way, things
> like relative source special directories and actually available fonts
> and stuff can be assured at build time.  In short: one should make best
> use of the fact that DVI files are not standalone, but integrated into
> the system.
> 
Well, so I guess we need a complete build dependency system for DVI
documentation?  Why not, but I certainly won't write it or maintain the huge
database needed in order to achieve proper compilation of a reasonable part
of it.  I already have enough work getting things to update from CTAN
smoothly, even without generating doc, thanks.  If you want to write and
maintain such a system, please go.

> It may well be that we don't have the resources to do this now.  But
> that does not mean we need to pretend that it would not be useful.
> 
IMO, what would be really useful is that someone writes a nice, fast, usable
and well TeX-integrated pdf viewer.  I'm just afraid that fast is a hard
point, due to the format...

Manuel.


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