[texdoc] tabular

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Tue Oct 24 01:19:00 CEST 2017


    What I get is a document named Tabulars with eledmac. Why?

Because, at present, texdoc works at the file level in principle,
looking for files related to the cmdline args.

If there is a Catalogue entry for the arg (=> ctan.org/pkg/tabular),
then it uses information from the Catalogue to guess at the best
file. In this case, there isn't.

So then it looks for package named tabular, e.g.,
texmf-dist/doc/latex/tabular/something.pdf. That doesn't exist either.

So then it has to match individual file names, and apparently 
 1 /home/texlive/karl/Master/texmf-dist/doc/latex/reledmac/examples/1-tabular.pdf
is the best that its algorithm found. Admittedly not what one wants to
see; we should probably downgrade hits under subdirectories like
/examples/.

But then the next hit is going to be:
 3 /home/texlive/karl/Master/texmf-dist/doc/latex/supertabular/README
which is not what one wants either. In fact, there is no individual file
in TL that documents the essential tabular (and nothing else), so far
as I can see.

So, you propose:

    shouldn't the tool directly link to the section 8.23 (tabular) of
    LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual ?

It's an interesting idea, but I somehow don't think it would be good to
intertwine latex2e.texi and texdoc in this way. Also, technically,
linking to an anchor within a document is an entirely different problem
than what texdoc is doing now. Doing that within a PDF, portably across
viewers, sounds impossible to me, but maybe there is a way. Doing that
in HTML is easy enough but is not typically what people want. And then
there is Info, for the few diehards like me who still care ... so it
introduces whole new sets of complications.

I could more easily imagine having a dedicated script to access nodes in
the "Unofficial reference manual", at least via PDF and HTML. But,
sadly, this is not something I will ever have the time and energy to
write. Maybe you, or someone on this list, would like to give it a try?

Thanks,
Karl


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