[tex-live] Pause option for TLMGR --help

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 8:17 AM, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)
<P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 02:48:45PM +0100, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>>
>>> Ah, different philosophy, Manuel : in the Windows
>>> world, each program is (expected to be) self-contained,
>>> so each would (in an ideal world) provide paging
>>> by itself rather than being dependent on being
>>> executed as part of a chain ...
>>> ** Phil.
>>
>> Then you shouldn't use TeX, it isn't self-contained, because
>> it does not include neither an editor nor an viewer. ;-)

The majority of TeX users I encounter would be surprised
to learn that (La)TeX on Windows can be invoked other
than from a button in WinEDT (or that there is any TeX but
MiKTeX).    To many users, TeX on Windows _is_
self-contained and provides .dvi and .pdf  viewing and
printing.  This world view is about to come crashing down
however, as their colleagues who use *X are now creating
.tex files with funny lines like:

%  -*- Coding: utf-8-unix -*-

> To be serious just for a second, there is a fundamental
> difference : it matters not one jot whether the editor
> and viewer run synchronously or asynchronously with
> TeX (indeed, the editor should logically run asynchronously),
> whilst a pager /must/ run synchronously.  As the average
> Windows user is typically unaware of program chaining
> via pipes, he or she will expect synchronous functionality
> to be integrated in the base product, whilst Unix/Linux
> (hereinafter Lunix) users almost invariably are familiar
> with program chaining and will (almost) expect to have
> to pipe through "more" if paged output is required.

I'm not sure TeX Live is for "the average Windows user".
The Cygwin port may prove more useful to the small
subset of Windows users who prefer to type "latex filename"
at a command prompt over clicking a "LaTeX" button.

Is it odd to be worrying about refining a user interface when
we don't even have a .dvi viewer?   Porting dvipsone and
dviwindo to Win32 would have far more significance for the
"the average Windows user".

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