[texdoc] `texdoc symbols` displays only some few pages of the "The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List"

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at gmx.de
Tue Jun 16 03:17:45 CEST 2015


On 2015-06-15 at 22:16:36 +0000, Karl Berry wrote:

 >     texdoc symbols
 >     opens symbols.dvi 
 > 
 > I suppose you mean symbols.pdf (not .dvi), indeed, from the new
 > maths-symbols package.
 > 
 > I renamed it to maths-symbols.pdf for tonight's update to see if that
 > helps.  If it does, I'll ask davidc/ctan to change the original.

Hi Karl,
I fear that this change alone doesn't solve the problem.  I just
applied the change manually.  In short, if you rename the file,
"texdoc symbols" still finds maths-symbols.pdf first.

The reason is that there are two files, symbols-{a4,letter}.pdf in a
directory called 'comprehensive'.  Hence these files don't get a
higher score due to the name of the directory.

One could set an alias 'symbols' => 'symbols-a4.pdf' but then texdoc
would still list 'maths-symbols.pdf' before 'symbols-letter.pdf'.

Maybe the score of 'maths-symbols.pdf' has to be lowered a little
bit.  If you search for 'maths-symbols', then 'maths-symbols.pdf' gets a
relatively high score because the directory name is called
'maths-symbols' too.

It seems that

 adjscore maths-symbols = -100 

in texdoc.cnf works, but let's try it tomorrow without my humble local
modifications.

BTW, the page-layout of DPC's [maths-]symbols.pdf is optimized for A4
paper but the actual size is 'letter'.  This looks ugly.  The easiest
solution is to create a PDF file in A4.  A better solution is to
provide files in both formats with dedicated page-layouts.  And a
title page would be nice too.  Especially because people think that
it's an excerpt of Scott Pakin's document.  It's all up to David but
you could mention it when you contact him.  Or shall I contact him
myself?  I doubt that DPC is on this list.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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