[tex-live] documentation

George White aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca
Thu Oct 27 20:00:15 CEST 2005


Quoting Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>:

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:00:54AM -0300, George White wrote:
> 
> > Quoting Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
> > 
> > > >>>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> writes:
> > > 
> > >   > Well, if you can make a patch for the texdoc .dat file, I can
> > >   > install it :).
> > > 
> > > I fear that, unlike texdoctk, texdoc simply uses ls-R as a database.  
> > > 
> > > Thomas recently mentioned that one can define aliases, but I think
> > > that it is best if the authors provide fixes.
> > 
> > It may be best, but is it practical?  Will aliases help when you have
> > dozens of manual.pdf files?  
> > 
> > I suspect it is much easier to make changes in texdoc to support 
> > "package/manual".  On systems that support symlinks one could process
> > the doc tree to make package/manual.pdf -> package/package.pdf.
> 
> And how you want to solve the problem of several documentation
> files? One symlink can point to just *one* file.

Hopefully the others will at least be be mentioned in manual.pdf, but 
this emphasizes the point that, for many packages, the directory in the
doc tree is the real connection to the package and may contain multiple files
with generic names like manual.pdf that may indicated the type of content but
tell you nothing about the package.

I find it is generally easier to find things in TLC 2nd ed than to use
texdoc or texdoctk, but TLC has a nasty habit of walking down the hall when I'm
not watching.  Maybe we are at the stage where a search engine is the better
approach.  Is there a way to limit google to some texlive doc tree on the web?

-- 
George N. White III
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia



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