[tex-live] texdoc can't find texmf.cnf

Greg Gamble gregg at maths.uwa.edu.au
Mon Jun 23 09:30:19 CEST 2008


On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 03:40:11AM +0200, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Arthur Reutenauer scripsit (23.06.2008 03:11)
> >   By the way, Jonathan, I noticed you used open for DVI files, but I
> > don't think it would really work for most people: users would have to
> > not only get the X server running, but also to make the association from
> > DVI files to xdvi (or some other DVI viewer program), which seems rather
> > unlikely to me; I have the impression xdvi would serve more users.  Of
> > course, it still means you need to have xdvi in your path and to launch
> > X11.app, but I feel you would get a better hit rate with the latter than
> > with open.
> > 
> In an ideal world, we shouldn't need to bother about dvi (and ps), since every
> documentation should be available in pdf format.  There's currently 221 dvi
> files in texlive: all of them are on my (mid-term) to-kill list :-)

Hmm! I for one completely disagree with you. DVI files are smaller ... while
kdvi is crap, xdvi is an excellent program ... it renders fast on the
screen, has every command available via keyboard accelerators ... in
particular, if I want to get to page 34, I type: 34g in the window ...
I can get resizing of the page also by say typing: 5s in the window.

For texdoc, I would much rather have my system find a DVI file and render
it with xdvi than it find a PDF file. Admittedly, most of what I want
to read is just text, with the occasional monochromatic diagram.

xpdf is not a bad program, but it is slower to render on the screen and
navigation requires the mouse. There's a nice feature that I can grab
text with the mouse and paste into another document, which I can't seem
to do with xdvi. Of course there are other nice features of xpdf and
even the slower-to-render acrobat reader (I'm not a fan of kpdf), but
for simply reading a document and quickly navigating to a page, nothing
beats xdvi. 

The only advantage of PDF is its universality ... every OS these days
has a reader, generally already installed ... and so, yes, I put all
my web files up in PDF ... but this is quite limiting, I'm forever
having to do clean-ups to avoid running out of space. PDF files are
so much more memory-hungry.

I even prefer PS to PDF ... I suppose that makes me a dinosaur ;-}

  Regards,
  Greg Gamble



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