[tex-live] 51232 re: Hidden treasures in TeXLive

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Sun Jun 10 12:51:20 CEST 2007


"Richard HARDWICK" <rch at skynet.be> wrote:

> Dear Sebastian Rahtz
>
>     I have been vaguely aware that there are lots of
>     interesting files sitting on my hard disk. No problem
>     for jpgs and gifs etc - my filemanager can show them as
>     thumbnails. But it cant do this for pdfs.
>
>     So I just hacked a perl script that runs through the pdfs
>     and spits out an html page, with thumbnails as clicky
>     links to each pdf.
>
>     And I immediately found lots and lots of hidden treasures
>     sitting in my directory TeXLive2005.
>     For which I thank you.
>
>     This is a purely private enterprise - the html layout is
>     not good, and my perl script is not fit for public
>     viewing - but I would like to suggest that your users
>     would be grateful for something like this in the next
>     edition of TeXLive

teTeX contained a "mkhtml" script (in shell, and a mkhtml.nawk version)
which did something similar.  It cannot work with docs in multiple texmf
trees, however, and I've found no easy way to change this.  Otherwise I
would have used it to dynamically update the information for the Debian
teTeX packages plus add-ons.  I guess if we want to do something like
this in TeXLive, an implementation in a more clever language than shell
(e.g. Perl) would be needed.

An interesting feature which we could try to inherit from mkhtml is that
it groups the files hierarchically according to the TDS, it starts with
"amstex" (three doc files in teTeX 3.0), then comes "bibtex" with
subcategories base and bibgerm (4 and 1 file, respectively), context
with base, bib, manual and ppchtex and so on.

It also doesn't look at pdf files exclusively.  And personally I'd
rather not have a view of the first PDF page on the html page, but
rather meta-information like number of pages, whether there's a
"Implementation" chapter, and perhaps even info extracted from the Info
dictionary of the PDF file (after which we could enhance doc.sty to
provide commands for this meta information).

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


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