[texdoc] Some small bugs and more

[Pathe Lists]

Yes, I mean "LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual".
 
And yes, I propose this *only* for this manual.
 
Because a newbie will think "hey, I need info about the 'include' command" and "hey, I know the texdoc command", so he will type "texdoc include"... and (I have just tried it) he will get the 'tikz include' manual, which does not meet his need.
 
An experienced user wouldn't do that: this is why I propose this *only* for the basic commands which appear in the table of contents of "LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual".

Patrick
member of GUTenberg, the french user group,
and moderator on texnique.fr, the french TeX Q&A.



Sent: Monday, November 13, 2017 at 9:44 AM
From: "Norbert Preining" <norbert at preining.info>
To: texdoc at tug.org
Subject: Re: [texdoc] Some small bugs and more
> If texdoc starts interacting with the user, couldn't we help a newbie,
> who would have been typing "texdoc label", with a reply such as "label
> is described in the LaTeX2e manual ; please type 'texdoc latex2e' to
> open it"?

And how would we get a definitive list of "xxx" for each of the many
documents "yyyyy" (in your case xxx=label, yyyyy=latex2e)?

Should that be parsed from the PDF? From the .sty files? From the .dtx
files?

The only reasonable way would be that someone sits down and compiles a
list by hand, but it will be very biased I guess.

> It needs a keyword list (containing every command that appears in the
> table of contents of the manual), and a feature replying, in case of a
> match, "$1 is described in the LaTeX2e manual ; please type 'texdoc
> latex2e' to open it".

So do you propose this *only* for the latex manual? That should be
doable by manually tweaking the texconf.cnf files by adding some alias
statements.

Furthermore, I guess you mean
LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual
right?

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer
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