[tex-live] tl doc formats

[David Kastrup]

Staszek Wawrykiewicz <staw at gust.org.pl> writes:

> On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>> Regarding the various doc questions.
>> 
>> In the past, TL compiled its own dvi doc files.  TL now uses the pdf's
>> from CTAN.  For various reasons, this provides better results in many
>> cases, and takes much less effort on my part.  Thus, I have no time or
>> interest in doing anything else.
>
> That's OK by me. David, would you imagine that many users need to reed
> the documentation *before* installing the whole stuff?

Uh, we are talking about TeXlive here?  The DVD with a live TeX system
including viewers on it?  So why wouldn't they be able to read the
documentation before installing the whole stuff?

> pdf seems the best for that.

TeXlive contains DVI viewers.  It does not contain PDF viewers.  So I
really don't understand how you gather that the users will be able to
view PDF without problems, but not DVI, if what they have is a TeXlive
DVD.

>> David, if you or anyone cares to take on the job of producing DVI
>> doc files with or without source specials, they could be perhaps be
>> included as well, or at least distributed from the web site.
>
> Eh, well, providing that *all* dvi viewers can accept source
> specials in the same manner (I've learned that "source specials"
> could be missuderdstood between different TeX distributions).

We are not talking about different TeX distributions here but about
TeXlive.  So we need only worry about the viewers in that.

> Ps. David, I really like your effort to the TeX community (not to
> mention fine guitar playing and climbing the Bachotek hut :-), but
> would you please to stop any comments concerning Windows?

You lost me there.  Could you please point out where I would have
commented on Windows?

> That would be great for us, as we (still well nondefined community)
> try to provide TL for both worlds (including also damned
> Windows). Thanks for rething that...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum