[pracjourn-forum] Re: Another newby question: Finding documentation

[Karl Berry]

    package documentation appears within the /doc/ subdirectory?

Yes.

    So, if and when package uploads to CTAN become more and more
    TDS-compliant, will it be easy to specify searches for official
    documentation within the corresponding /doc/ ?

The TDS is not primarily for CTAN (though many large packages follow
it), it's for runtime distributions.  TL, MiKTeX, teTeX, and so on
already follow the TDS just about completely as far as I know (don't
know about the commercial versions).  So in TL, there is
texmf-dist/doc/generic/pstricks for example -- which is essentially a
copy of the files from CTAN.

Thomas Esser and others wrote a script texdoc which tries to look for
documentation for a given package in the locally-installed TeX.  It
comes up empty for pstricks, though (there is no pstricks.pdf, .dvi,
etc.).

There is inevitably a lag between CTAN updates and distribution updates;
being able to search CTAN directly would be useful regardless of what is
available in the distributions.

The TDS has been around for many, many, years and been nearly completely
stable.  I don't think more TDS compliance is anything wait for.

Cheers,
k