[tex-live] [Fwd: Re: TeXdoc XeTeX produces unexpected result]

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Looks like I forgot to keep the list in Cc. Forwarding my previous answer.

-------- Message original --------
Sujet : Re: [tex-live] TeXdoc XeTeX produces unexpected result
Date : Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:31:02 +0100
De : Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr>
Pour : Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>
Références : <491C2541.80307 at Rhul.Ac.Uk>

Philip TAYLOR a écrit :
>     TeXdoc XeTeX
> 
> and Acrobat then displayed information on the ifxetex package.

Quite bad indeed.

> Is there no documentation on XeTeX that is accessible to TeXdoc,

First, when texdoc doesn't show you what you want (but still finds a
result), you should always try the -l option. Here you have

mpg at roth:~% texdoc -l XeTeX
texdoc info: No exact match, trying full search mode.
1	/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/doc/xetex/base/XeTeX-notes.pdf
2	/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-doc/doc/english/xetexref/XeTeX-reference.pdf
3	/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-doc/doc/english/xetexref/XeTeX-reference.pdf

On windows you also have ifxetex.pdf because your filesystem isn't case
sensitive (I should maybe fix texdoc so that it behaves the same on both
platforms), and why the 2 is duplicated, I don't know yet.

Second, there is currently an informal convention that you should add
-ref to the name of an engine to see its reference manual and -man to
see its man page (when available): it works with etex-ref, pdftex-ref,
luatex-ref. I can't remember why I didn't make such an alias for xetex,
but probably I was hesitating between XeTeX-notes and XeTeX-reference.

> and if not, how is one best advised to learn how to use XeTeX?
> 
Informal advice: if you're using LaTeX, then probably the best place to
start are the fontspec and xltxtra manuals. There is alos online a XeTeX
Companion by M. Goossens.

Manuel.

PS: there is a dedicated texdoc mailing list...