[OS X TeX] R, paradigm to bring into the LaTeX world?
Alain Schremmer
Schremmer.Alain at gmail.com
Mon Oct 23 10:02:32 EDT 2006
Victor Ivrii wrote:
> On 10/23/06, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>
>> Give the volume of things at CTAN I think
>> it would be a truely daunting task to filter through things and add/
>> delete/change the individual structures of the packages so they could
>> be automatically indexed.
>> Good Luck,
>>
>
> There is another thing: documentation to different packages is written
> in very different formats (I don't think it would be a difficult to
> convert all dvis and ps files to pdf) and the version history is
> rather seldom.
If I were to do it, I would proceed in much the same way that I do when,
say, I decide to straighten out the mess in my workshop at the end of
the season (I do construction work) or in my office every few months:
Instead of coping with the whole mess all at once, I bring order to,
say, that bench/desk in the corner. Then, that to shelving next to it,
etc. One advantage is that it is a lot less depressing as, within a
finite amount of time, you can see what you have done.
So, in this case, instead of "filter through things and add/
delete/change the individual structures of the packages so they could be
automatically indexed", I would try to determine a possibly small set of
packages for which it would be "easy" to do so and then, once the
indexing tool worked, approach the authors of a few more packages to try
to entice them to change whatever is needed to make their package come
under the indexing tool. In other words, I would try "de faire tache
d'huile", i.e. very, very loosely translated, divide and conquer.
Of course, since I have no idea of what is involved, this may be quite
impossible for some reason that I can't even magine.
Best regards
--schremmer
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