[pracjourn-forum] Another newby question: Finding documentation

[Karl Berry]

    I went to CTAN, typed 'pstricks' and searched.

I often search google instead of ctan when looking for general
information, which has a better chance of actually getting to a package
home page.  In this case, http://tug.org/applications/PSTricks.  It
seems the pstricks documentation situation is quite confused.  I'll ask
Herbert about that.

I also reported the mysterious error message problem to Herbert, and he
said he'll put in an explicit check for running under pdftex next time
around.

    Pages and pages of directory files.......Which one is what I want?

Generally, a directory with the given name, graphics/pstricks in this
case.

    Is there some standard way that the basic doc file for a package
    is llisted?  (e.g. should I have searched for pstricks.doc?)  

pdf is the most likely; CTAN requests/requires new uploads have
documentation in PDF.  Unfortunately, there is no standard for what the
file should be named, and people do all kinds of things.  And older
packages may only have a .dtx (which you can hopefully then process with
[pdf]latex), or nothing at all.

Hmm, it would be useful to find only pdf files within a given directory.
I wrote a script to do that for what's on TL (it generates doc.html on
the CD), but something dynamic would be better.

It seems TUGIndia has written some pstricks tutorials:
http://sarovar.org/projects/pstricks/

Perhaps they will help with the actual learning :).

k