Package documentation (was Re: [OS X TeX] Minimal flowchart)

[Alan Munn]

At 8:45 PM -0700 5/8/07, Joshua Smith wrote:
>On May 8, 2007, at 8:21 PM, Adam M. Goldstein wrote:
>>
>>On May 8, 2007, at 8:18 PM, Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:
>>
>>>Are you sure it is not installed already? What distribution are 
>>>you using? Try running kpsewhich pgf.sty to see if it is actually 
>>>already installed. Best, Mark
>>
>>I have TL2007, and the kpsewhihch command Mark suggests found 
>>pgf.sty om my machine.
>>
>>I think Schremmer uses gwTeX, though? As a matter of fact ``locate 
>>pgf" finds it in the appropriate gwTeX folders.
>>
>>So have at it . . .
>
>I am considering using pgf/TikZ.  I see (now) that gwTeX includes 
>it, but when trying to open the documentation, texdoc pgf and texdoc 
>tikz do not find anything, but texdoc pgfmanual does.  I only knew 
>this filename because I thought gwTeX did not include it and found 
>the manual in the package download.  As another example, texdoc 
>hyperref and texdoc hyperref/manual yield two different pdfs.  In 
>general, how I am supposed to know how to call the documentation if 
>texdoc <packagename> does not open it?

This is a bit of a pain.  It would be much nicer if package authors 
made the documentation file the same as the package name, so that to 
find the docs for foo.sty one could always type texdoc foo.  However, 
since it's not this way, I usually use locate and grep to find the 
doc files related to a package.  So locate foo | grep doc will yield 
a list of files from which one can usually guess the right one for 
the manaual.  Then use texdoc to open that file.  Maybe there's a 
better way.

TCOB browser theoretically can do this better, but I never seemed to 
figure out how to get it to find all the local documentation.  (It 
seems to find some but not others.)

Alan
-- 
Alan Munn 
amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics                             
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824       Tel.  +1-517-355-7491

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