[texhax] TeX Live documentation

[Uwe Lück]

Before (on texhax), on "missing" TeX Live Documentation, I focussed 
on binaries. I did not mention another point, because it is not so 
clear with the distinction between "using" and "installing" TeX Live, 
and because I had to recall something. That was last year, 
integrating a second texmf tree for material outside CTAN. 
It was for a server, so it was essentially an administrator's issue.

I think I have found the solution today. The TeX Live manual may 
need no improvement here, but it was hard for me, perhaps just 
personally because in the beginning (last year), I did not start 
with the TeX Live documentation, but with the texhash help and 
the TDS specification. So I just spent much time with documentation 
that was not very relevant for my problem.

A general subject with perhaps-incompleteness of documentation 
may be that (especially with complex software) that manuals 
sometimes seem to be little helpful for "impatient" users.
An alternative may be "user-driven documentation" -- an FAQ; 
so structured that the most frequent or urgent questions are 
the most easy to find.

There actually is such an FAQ for TeX Live:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TeX_Live_FAQ

for example "I want to use ConTeXt". Until one has something 
better, one might point there.

That approach may also be helpful if, as Karl tells me off-list, 
TeX Life offers so much that is just too much for the maintainers 
to document it completely. As to binaries (that I focussed on 
before), this even seems to hold for engines and formats -- 
when I compare the TeX Live manual with Arno Trautmann's 
list of binaries.

The user's separate tree may be something very important, 
thinking of the user's favourite shorthands used for most 
documents.

Best,

    Uwe.