[tex-live] query about archives

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Wed 10th Sep, 2008 at 18:16, Karl Berry seems to have written:

>    de-macro:
> 1) We already have detex, does this do a better job?

It just does a different job. At least, insofar as I understand these
things:
- detex strips out TeX/LaTeX macros
- de-macro eliminates *private* LaTeX macros defined with \newcommand
   etc. and replaces them with non-private equivalents. So it won't do
   anything for private macros defined in other ways (e.g. with \def)
   but if you use the LaTeX syntax, the macro will be expanded and each
   call to the macro will be replaced with its expansion.
So the first is useful for getting a more accurate word count while the
second might be useful in preparing a file for exchange or
post-processing.

> 2) The author says the Python script would need "adjusting" for Windows.

Yes...  and if python is not in /usr/bin... (I'd expect it to use
/usr/bin/env but maybe that creates other incompatibilities...)


- cfr

>
> 	licence: Academic Free Licence 2.1
> 		(can only find version 3.0 in English right now,
> 		though, so I don't know what it says)
>
> It's free (but suboptimal/not recommended) -- gnu.org/l/license-list.html.