[tex-live] tds

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Heiko Oberdiek scripsit (16.06.2008 21:47)
>> I don't think it's worth investing time in debating which things end up
>> in which tree.  There is no one right answer.  The only rational way to
>> find documentation is to search via texdoc/locate/whatever, not browse
> 
> Both texdoc and locate require the name of the documentation

Texdoc shouldn't and hopefully won't any more require the exact name of the
documentation in the future.  I'll work on this after this year's release.

> and
> they will not show a file listing with all relevant documentation.

At the moment, there is the -s option which show quite a lot of possible
documentation, but not exactly just the relevant documentation.

> Example:
>   "texdoc pdftex" or "texdoc xetex" fail. But TDS says in principle,
>   where the documentation files reside.
>     TDS:doc/<program name>/
>   In case of pdfTeX is shows different documentation files, examples, ...
>   if I have the luck to hit the right texmf tree.
> Therefore I can't see the benefit of having three texmf trees,
> it just make life harder.
> 
Well, anyway I don't think the user should need to learn the TDS in order to
be able to read documentation.  I think the better is to learn texdoc the TDS
(or more precisely the TDS implementation chosen in TL) with some heuristic
and/or have it read a database with the relevant info (the Catalogue, heance
the texlive.tlpdb file contains such information).

>> We've talked about various ways of improving texdoc already.  Here's
>> another one: good full-text search of all files (especially PDF).  Now
>> there's a project ...
>
A first step in this direction would be to have a full-text search in the
longdesc field of texlive.tlpdb (like the online search on CTAN, but local so
faster and more accessible).  There's a few details that need attention in
this part but we'll discuss them later.

> Or a TeX macro index, showing where a macro is defined and documented.
> 
This a kind of holy grail, isn't it?

Manuel.