[tex-live] Package documentation

[Robin Fairbairns]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:

> Karl Berry a écrit :
> >     and I wonder if it would be possible to make texdoc check that field
> >     of the catalogue (or a documentation names database extracted from
> >     it) in order to
> > 
> > Anything is possible, this is software after all, but it is not a
> > trivial task.  If anyone wants to volunteer to do serious development on
> > texdoc, that would be great.
> 
> Well, I thought a bit about that: indeed this is not trivial. I think that
> certainly the best solution is to have a sort of documentation database built
> with the catalogue, because it will certainly be difficult to extract the
> information from the HTML file on the fly in texlua (and not very effective).
> I'm quite motivated to have a closer look at this, though I'm not sure if my
> scripting skills will be enough...

it's not (quite) as bad as that: the html (as is the way) has a poor
structure, but all the information is in xml, from which the html is
generated.

this is better news only in the sense that deriving the database you're
imagining isn't going to be (quite) as bad as you might think.

robin