[tex-live] Improving or rewriting texdoctk

[George N. White III]

On 7/1/07, Florent Rougon <f.rougon at free.fr> wrote:


> The problems with the trivial approach (as opposed to the debtags route)
> are the following:
>
>   - a simple static hierarchical classification as currently implemented
>     in texdoctk is never completely satisfactory: when writing the
>     metadata for packages, we (ideally upstream authors) will have to
>     find the proper category, and sometimes:
>       * there are several relevant categories;
>       * or there is no appropriate category.

It can be useful to beginners as a guide to the most important documents
and their relationships.

>   - if all the documents in TL are referenced this way, I think we'll
>     end up with either of these problems:
>       * too many categories to be usable (imagine starting texdoctk and
>         having 50 categories or so to choose from);
>       * some categories will have too many documents in them to be
>         conveniently browsable.
>
> That's why I was thinking of implementing a debtags-like approach, which
> could actually be used to classify LaTeX packages, not only their
> documentation (it would be ridiculous to have an excellent way to
> classify and browse LaTeX documentation and no corresponding way to
> browse through the packages, since there is most of the time a very
> clear relationship between one package and one or more doc files).
>
>   [1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/

There are a number of fallbacks beyond texdoc and texdoctk -- printed
books (The Latex Companion, 2nd ed), the online catalog, google, local
search (beagle, namazu, etc.).   From my perspective, new users often
find obsolete information that causes problems (the first two links for a
google of "latex eps figure" point to epsfig and epsf).

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia