[latexrefman-discuss] permission to incorporate latex docs into devdocs.io

[Karl Berry]

Hi Alex,

    Where can I find the license statement?  I couldn't find it here:
    - http://home.gna.org/latexrefman/

It's in the latex2e.texi source file itself (where it needs to be).

    Do you agree that yours is the most complete unified LaTeX reference?

To my knowledge, yes.  (FYI, calling it "mine" feels wrong, since I
didn't write much of the text.  I'm the current "chief maintainer", I
suppose, but I inherited the bulk of the document from other people's
work listed in the intro.)

The numerous guides and intros aren't intended as references -- indeed,
I had exactly your experience, and that is why I started working on
latexrefman; I wanted a reference, for myself.  There are other
references around, but as far as I know latexrefman is the only one that
is (a) freely available and (b) actively maintained.

    Why are \hbox and \vbox not included?

Indeed, they're not part of LaTeX. I don't have a copy of Lamport's
book here to check, but I believe that \hbox and \vbox are not mentioned
there, whereas \hfill is.  (\hfill is also not a LaTeX command.)

That said, adding sections for \hbox and \vbox, and maybe other common
plain TeX/primitive commands might not be bad, even if just to say they
are plain TeX commands and one should use \mbox and \parbox instead.

Aside: there's a terse reference list of all plain TeX and primitive
commands at http://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html, but that is
not freely available for copying, etc.  Much less conveniently, there
are reference lists in TeX for the Impatient
(http://www.ctan.org/pkg/impatient, pdf page 333ff) and TeX by Topic
(http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbytopic), both of which are free.  Maybe
someday I or someone will extract the command summaries from those books
and make them available as HTML.

    DevDocs is open source (MPL).  The scrapers are here:

Great, but I'm not worried about the sources of their software, but
about them making available the presumably-modified source of
latexrefman which they use to make their version.  I.e., if a user sees
a manual via devdocs, they should also be able to see the source that
devdocs used, and be able to get back to the original.  I don't see how
to get their (or any) doc sources in the web interface.  Oh well.

    Their README mentions 'thor docs:download' as a command for updating.
    However, I don't know how that works or what it accomplishes.

My point is that if they take it upon themselves to include latexrefman
as of <some date>, they should also take it upon themselves to get
updated versions on a regular version.  Which they hopefully already do
with all their other manuals.  Otherwise the site would be basically
useless after a couple of years.  The document authors can't be
responsible for keeping devdocs up to date.

    Once this is complete, a user will be able to type 'dd latex \hfill' or 
    even just 'dd ltx hfil' to view the documentation about \hfill.

Off the subject, but dd is a terribly-conflicting name for their
command-line program.  Haven't they heard of dd, the utility that has
been around since (more or less) day one of Unix?  Oh well.

All the best,
Karl