[tex-live] TeX Live suggestions

Heiko Oberdiek oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de
Sun Jan 31 04:16:23 CET 2010


On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 01:54:24AM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:

>     missing documentation
>             symbols of textcomp
> 
> textcomp.sty is generated from ltoutenc, so it seems to me the best we
> can do (lacking dedicated documentation, which presumably will not be
> forthcoming) is to alias textcomp to ltoutenc in texdoc.
> 
> However ... TL 2008 had a ltoutenc.pdf, but it does not exist in TL'09.
> 
> Heiko, was this intentional?  (What we install in TL comes straight from
> your latex-tds project, for which I am ever so thankful, BTW.)

Yes, because it is part of source2e as "File l".
The LaTeX kernel sources consists of 40 dtx files.
I doubt it makes sense to generate separate PDF files
additionally. Thus `textcomp' should be aliased to `source2e'.
This might be a little irritating, but simple text search for
"textcomp" reveals "20.2 The textcomp package" in the table
of contents. If a user fails with simple text search, then
I don't think he wouldn't happier with ltoutenc.pdf. It doesn't
have a table of contents and the package is described quite late.
Also the description is more documented source code for developers
than a comprehensive user manual.

Also there are even classes in latex/base that lacks
PDF files at all: minimal.cls; "texdoc minimal" finds
  texmf-dist/doc/latex/europecv/examples/minimal.pdf
and "texdoc minimal.cls" doesn't find documentation.
It's a similar case like url.sty, the class is documented
in the class file itself.

Other example, "texdoc makeidx" finds makeindx.pdf that
describes packages makeidx and showidx, but "texdoc showidx"
doesn't find documentation.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>


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