[tex-live] texdoc doesn't find man pages

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Werner LEMBERG scripsit (16.07.2008 06:55)
> Other extensions might be possible too, for example `.5'...
> 
Sure, this was just an example.  But for now, there's only section 1 and 5 man
pages in TL, so we're fine with just .1 and .5

>> (new config file for texdoc, still undocumented):
>>
>> ext_list = .pdf, .pdf.gz, .pdf.bz2, .dvi, .dvi.gz, .dvi.bz2, .ps,
>> .ps.gz, .ps.bz2, .txt, .txt.gz, .txt.bz2, .html, .1
>> viewer_1 = man
> 
By the way the format changed yesterday, we don't put the dots now.  And
compressed doc support is disabled by default, so the list would rather look like
ext_list = pdf, html, txt, ps, dvi, 1, 5

> I don't want to do this manually.  texdoc should automatically display
> man pages *which are within the distribution*.  Otherwise, similar to
> the standalone `info' program, it might fire up `man' to display a
> corresponding system man page (however, this is debatable and should
> be configurable).
> 
Depends if you mean :
1. texdoc should display man pages like the man command
2. texdoc should display some form of the man pages

If you mean 1, I disagree since this is not possible on win32 and we don't
want to make texdoc behave differently on different platforms, and it's to
late to include some man-like and info-like binary for windows.  So this will
not be possible by default, at least this year, but you will be able to
configure it easily.

If you mean 2, I strongly agree.  Actually, we decided to produce pdf forms of
the man/info pages and ship them.  This way, texdoc can display the
information from the manpages in a easy, system-independent way.

On Unix, if your prefer the man/info reader over the pdf version, you can
still configure this by changing the order of extensions in your texdoc.cnf:
ext_list= 1,5,pdf,html,#etc

> The probably best program to convert man pages to another high-level
> format is Eric Raymond's `doclifter'.  It's small (300kByte of Python
> code), and we could add it to TeXLive:
> 
>   http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/
> 
> However, it converts to XML, and xmltex of TeXLive can't handle this
> out of the box (I've just tried to call it, but I don't know the
> details how to configure it properly).
> 
Thanks for the hint.  We'll probably choose pdf output, so maybe
man -t and ps2pdf will be enough.

Manuel.