[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

[Frank Küster]

Florent Rougon <f.rougon at free.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
>
>> Frank,
>> if Debian needs all PDF files comressed, which tools does Debian
>> provide to deal with them?
>
>   1) Debian doesn't provide 'brain', but it has been a standard component
>      required on the user side for a lot of years...
>
>   2) see(1)
>
>   3) zxpdf(1)

4) texdoclua(1)

>> And why do you take care about Windows?
>
> I'm not Frank, but I suppose the reason is that he's a nice guy and
> takes pity on those poor lost souls (well, to be accurate, sometimes
> they are not lost but simply forced by someone higher in the hierarchy
> :).

Yes, if texdoc supports compressed files on most platforms, why should I
leave that out on Windows?

>> In TeXLive we cannot have compressed PDF files because this would
>> break a lot of things.  There are HTML files with links to PDF files

It's not only about PDF files, which are at the moment not compressed in
Debian's TeXLive packages.  But DVI files are compressed (and xdvi can
deal with that on its own).

> FWIW, I'm pondering these days about rewriting texdoctk in Python (and
> probably Qt for the GUI toolkit) to deal with the major problems we've
> seen in the last years, mainly that:
>
>   - distributors such as Debian want each package to be able to provide
>     its own peace of metadata describing the documentation provided by
>     the package. This avoids the need of a permanent superman
>     maintaining a central database that records all documents in the TeX
>     world.

Have you talked to Thomas Ruedas about that?  I think he also considered
this. Maybe he has some code (but you'd have to read Perl, which is said
to be harder than to write it...)

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