[tex-live] texdoc under windows

[George N. White III]

On 6/9/07, Simon Dreher <simon.dreher at gmx.net> wrote:

> I recently switched from mikTeX to TeXlive under windows (with the tetex
> package selection plus various other packages). But here, I miss texdoc.
> texdoctk works fine, but I got used to the simple texdoc. Is it not
> available in TeXlive, or how can I select texdoc for installation?

Did MikTeX have a texdoc, or are you thinking of tetex on *x?

You didn't mention which version of TeX Live you are using.  I don't
think the texdoctk.dat file is being maintained, so in TL2007 many
documents are not found.   The majority are .dvi --> .pdf, but some
have changed names/locations.

You might look into using msys to run texdoc on Windows, but some
effort may be needed to get it working.  Watch out for the search path.
On tetex, $TEXMF/doc was used, but this misses local additions to
$TEXDOCS, so for completness, one has to use the latter.  Unfortunately,
this leads to searching many more directories, so can be tedious to use.

These days I tend to avoid texdoc in favor of "locate" and full-text indexing
on systems that have decent implementations.   These are good enough
that texdoc (with "-s") has become more of a debugging tool for me than
a way to view documentation.

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