[texdoc] texdoc vntex

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sun Mar 14 20:59:28 CET 2010


On 14 March 2010 Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

 > Reinhard Kotucha a écrit :
 > >  > TEXDOCS = .;$TEXMF/doc//
 > > 
 > > Any reason for searching in the current directory?  It sometimes
 > > yields unexpected results.
 > >  
 > Dunno. I has been this way for years, and is consistent with
 > TEXSOURCES and a lot of other similar variables. I'm not very fond
 > of it either.

I don't think it has to be consistent with other variables.  In many
cases it's necessary to have '.' in the search path.  But as far as
TEXDOCS is concerned, the situation is different.  There are many
files called "manual.pdf", "README",... and it's very likely that a
wrong file is found.

And I'm sure that nobody uses texdoc in order to search for files in
the current working directory.

If there is a particular file in the CWD, it's not obvious what's
going wrong.  I had vntex.pdf in $HOME because I downloaded it from
CTAN, using wget, in order to copy+paste the URL from the terminal to
a mail message and to be sure that the URL doesn't contain any typos.

When I then ran

  texdoc vntex

I first blamed Adobe Reader that the hyperlinks didn't work.

 > Karl, any opinion on that point?
 > 
 > > $ texdoc -s hyperref
 > >  1 /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/doc/latex/hyperref/manual.pdf
 > >  2 /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/doc/latex/hyperref/hyperref.pdf
 > > 
 > > I think that hyperref.pdf should come first because this is the
 > > file containing the links to all the other files.
 > > 
 > It used to come first, but regularly I got requests to make
 > manual.pdf come first...

Sure, it saves them one mouse click.  But it prevents others from
getting the whole stuff by default.  I don't think the alias is a good
idea.  It makes Heiko's efforts (providing an "umbrella document")
useless.

If in doubt, ask Heiko.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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