[tex-k] [john@cs.york.ac.uk: web2c and detex(1)]

[john@cs.york.ac.uk]

On 24 Oct, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> surely ispell reads .tex files natively? I am vaguely surprised
> to still hear of people wanting detex in this day and age :-}
> 
> I'd be happy to include detex in TeXLive, if someone
> does the work. Not just the kpathseaing of it (which is
> quite straightforward, from memory), but the suite of
> autoconf stuff as well. Can you get someone at York to do it?
> You seem to have some noisy TeX users there....

Yes, we have ispell - but there are other uses for detex than to prepare
a TeX souce file for spell checking. I get asked about grammar checkers
these days - I don't know of one which reads TeX source directly.
Similarly word counting. Perhaps emacs offers all these facilities to
its users - but not everyone here uses emacs. Besides, `detex |' is very
much the Unix tools approach to things - I despair of the day when all
programs are integrated monstrosities that I can't adapt to my own
needs.

And, yes, I know - if I want an autoconf-ed, kpathsea-ed, detex I should
do it myself. It would be an interesting exercise, I admit.
-- 

John A. Murdie
Experimental Officer (Software)
Department of Computer Science
University of York
England