[tex-live] texdoc index

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue Dec 27 19:25:43 CET 2011


On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Victor Ivrii <vivrii at gmail.com> wrote:

> PS There is a difference between "contains bugs" and "buggy", between
> "buggy" and "broken" and between "broken" and "completely broken".

but much of the difference is in the eye of the beholder.

texdoc falls into the same category as mail user agents ("all mail
user agents suck, mutt just sucks less).  Both need to make sense of
relatively uncontrolled input data and face a wide range user needs,
wants, and expectations.   It is easier to say something is buggy or
broken when everyone can agree on the correct behaviour.  Suckiness
may be a better term when there are disagreements over the correct
behaviour.   Just as there are many (all sucky) mail user agents,
there are many (all sucky) tools that attempt to make sense of
collections of unstructured documents.   All but texdoc have the
advantage that compalints from users end up in forums other than the
TL list.

General purpose tools to have mechanisms to restrict searches to
particular directory trees, so can be used to index/search the TEXMF
trees, e.g.,

$ locate /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/*index*.{pdf,txt}
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/authorindex/authorindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/bezos/esindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/biblatex/examples/20-indexing-basic.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/biblatex/examples/21-indexing-advanced.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/hvindex/hvindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/index/index.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/ltxindex/ltxindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/oberdiek/scrindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/robustindex/robustsample.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/splitindex/splitidx.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/varindex/varindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/xdoc/docindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/lualatex/luaindex/luaindex-example.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/lualatex/luaindex/luaindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/support/makeindex/ind.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/support/makeindex/makeindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/support/mkgrkindex/mkgrkindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/xelatex/xecyr/rumakeindex-ex-x.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/xelatex/xeindex/xeindex.pdf
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/ltxindex/copying.txt
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/splitindex/install.txt
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/doc/latex/varindex/varindex.txt
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/source/latex/splitindex/install.txt
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/source/latex/splitindex/manifest.txt

It is quite reasonable for the original to feel that texdoc ranks high
on the suckiness scale, but that does not mean it is more than mildly
sucky for others, or that one of the other more general tools can't be
made to suck less for the OP.

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


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