[tex-live] texdoc under windows

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Sun Jun 10 14:17:09 CEST 2007


On 6/10/07, Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> wrote:

> I'm the one who started to rewrite texdoc in Perl.  I think that it
> would definitely be better to do it in texlua.  If there are any
> problems, let's see this just as a real-world testing example, and if
> any internals change, well, it's just going to be a couple of replaces
> in the script.
>
> The only problem is that I don't know lua at all, and that I won't have
> much time for software development when I start my new job in August.  I
> had hoped to be able to produce something useful in Perl until then, but
> I'm definitely sceptical about doing the same in lua.
>
> But anyway, where can I find an introductory tutorial into
>
> a) lua

<http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaTutorial> is very basic, but I find it important
to read such material because it makes it easier to discuss things with
newcomers (or warm them to look elsewhere!). It has links to other
reference material.  I haven't had timeto study, so it might be riddled
with errors and bad info.

> b) kpse* in luatex?
>
> > The one thing that is definately missing right now is something
> > like 'texluatk'. There is no pTK binding for the latest Lua,
> > and I have not investigated other GUI options yet.
>
> I was talking about texdoc, texdoctk is something different.  It's
> written in Perl, and if any changes are needed to make it run under
> Windows, I'd rather make these in the existing implementation.  The real
> problem of texdoctk, as Reinhard has pointed out, is maintaining the
> database.
>
> Maybe the "makehtml" approach discussed in the other thread ("Hidden
> treasures in TeXLive") is a better alternative there.  Starting with a
> sorting after the TDS, one could just add additional grouping
> information as much as there is available, and leave the rest in a
> "unsorted" category.

Interface aside, there are two approaches represented by texdoc and
texdoctk:

texdoc -- search TEXDOC trees for matching files.  This is slow with the
current kpathsea interface.   The proper fix may require fixing the long-lost
--all option to kpsewhich.

texdoctk -- you only see what is in the database, but you can browse an
organized list of topics.   This just can't work unless database maintenance
can be automated.   I'd prefer to see a system that is based on a more
comprehensive "master list" rather than from what is currently installed,
but I also see the value in a stripped down texdoctk.dat that just organizes
the docs for the most widely used and important packages, but offers a
"Search <more comprehensive database>" option (which could just open
a browser page).

The "TeX Catalog Online" seems to be a reasonable database.  A
search for "lm" which takes a long time with texdoc on local disk is
fast on the TCO.  Looking for the latin modern docs is also fast, and
gives:

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are 6 matching packages.
These are all the results.  For more on any package, click on its name.

  	Package  	Caption

1 	ae 	            Virtual fonts for T1 encoded CMR-fonts.
2 	ec 	            Computer modern fonts in T1 and TS1 encodings.
3 	euenc 	          Unicode font encoding definitions for XeTeX.
4 	fontch 	           Changing fonts, sizes and encodings in Plain TeX.
5 	lm 	             Latin modern fonts in outline formats.
6 	metatype1 	Generate Type 1 fonts from MetaPost.


To search again, enter a new string: latin modern
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clicking "lm" I get pointers to the package and the very helpful
information that
the package is included by TeX Live and MikTeX.   The missing step is a quick
way to view the docs for a locally installed package once I know the
name of the
package.

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


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