[texdoc] TeXdoc : could it do more ?

[Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> And actually the catalogue says so:
> 
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/fix2col.html

Yes, that is another useful resource which I had overlooked.
This is the problem with long years spent in the wilderness,
dealing with web pages rather than the real world of
computer typesetting : thank G at d for retirement !

> Well, there is a lot of useful information in the catalogue and is would indeed
> be good for texdoc to use it. Currently the obsolescence information in the
> catalogue exists only in human-readable form, not machine-readable, AFAIK. So it
> is not possible in the immediate future for texdoc to use it.
> 
> More generally, I'd like a notion of metadata (language, obsolescence, type of
> document (man page, user guide, reference, source)) that texdoc could use and/or
> present to the user. The better way to achieve it is probably to standardise the
> information that is already in the catalogue, and then make texdoc able to read
> it (in one form or another, since we do not include the catalogue in TL any
> more). Unfortunately, I have currently no time to discus it with the catalogue
> maintainers or otherwise work on it, but it is planned for later.
> 
> Btw, thanks for your suggestion, obsolescence information was not on my list
> yet, and indeed it would be very useful.

Excellent, thank you for taking it on board.  A synthesis of
TeXdoc and the Catalogue would be a very useful tool indeed.

** Phil.