[tex-live] teTeX: no next release

[David Kastrup]

Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Ccing the TeXLive list.
>>
>> "Michael A. Peters" <mpeters at mac.com> writes:
>>
>>> It seems that TeX Live has a lot of documentation that teTeX did not
>>> have, and it also seems that lot of documentation that teTeX had has
>>> dvi files, TeX Live has as PDF - and there is not a dvi file to
>>> justify deletion of the PDF.
>>>
>>> Just a random example - the totpages.dvi file in tetex 3 is about
>>> 28kb and the totpages.pdf file in tex live is about 200kb, ~ 8x the
>>> size.
>>
>> Personally, I think TeXLive should use as much dvi in its
>> documentation tree as possible, preferably using Source Specials.
>> Quite faster to access.  
>
> I thought source specials were only useful for navigating between
> source and dvi, so how can I benefit from them when I just read the
> docs?

Being able to jump to the .dtx file in question is helpful because you
can cut&paste better from the corresponding source.  And even more so
if there are several source files, like with source2e.dvi.  Code reuse
is one of the major selling points of FOS.

And with regard to forward search: if you want to print the relevant
pages from source2e.dvi for some lines in ltfloat.sty, being able to
use forward search will be beneficial.

Source specials obviously impact the dvi size, but I think that the
cost/benefit ratio is much better than for using PDF altogether.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum