[OS X TeX] R, paradigm to bring into the LaTeX world?

[Alain Schremmer]

Victor Ivrii wrote:

> On 10/23/06, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>
>> Give the volume of things at CTAN I think
>> it would be a truely daunting task to filter through things and add/
>> delete/change the individual structures of the packages so they could
>> be automatically indexed.
>> Good Luck,
>>
>
> There is another thing: documentation to different packages is written
> in very different formats (I don't think it would be a difficult to
> convert all dvis and ps files to pdf) and the version history is
> rather seldom.

If I were to do it, I would proceed in much the same way that I do when, 
say,  I decide to straighten out the mess in my workshop at the end of 
the season (I do construction work) or in my office every few months: 
Instead of coping with the whole mess all at once, I bring order to, 
say, that bench/desk in the corner. Then, that to shelving next to it, 
etc. One advantage is that it is a lot less depressing as, within a 
finite amount of time, you can see what you have done.

So, in this case, instead of "filter through things and add/ 
delete/change the individual structures of the packages so they could be 
automatically indexed", I would try to determine a possibly small set of 
packages for which it would be "easy" to do so and then, once the 
indexing tool worked, approach the authors of a few more packages to try 
to entice them to change whatever is needed to make their package come 
under the indexing tool. In other words, I would try "de faire tache 
d'huile", i.e. very, very loosely translated, divide and conquer.

Of course, since I have no idea of what is involved, this may be quite 
impossible for some reason that I can't even magine.

Best regards
--schremmer

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