[texhax] Rotate text

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-05-13 at 16:25:37 +0000, Lars Madsen wrote:

 > 
 > \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
 > \usepackage{graphicx}% <-------- remember
 > \begin{document}
 > 
 > \rotatebox{180}{\parbox{4in}{\em Answer: Take any ten pennies, set
 >     them aside and turn them over.  They're group one.  The rest of
 >     the pennies are group two.  Open your eyes (take off the
 >     blindfold), and you'll see that both groups have the same number
 >     of tails.}}
 > 
 > 
 > \end{document}


It's often useful to consult the  documentation.  TeX Live provides
two programs, texdoc and texdoctk.

texdoc is quite useful if you know what you are looking for.
Something like

  texdoc <package name>

should always work.  In this particular case

  texdoc graphicx

points you to the documentation.


texdoctk is using a graphical user interface.  It's using a manually
maintained database.  The database is not really maintained anymore
and thus quite incomplete.  Though it's very hard to maintain such a
database manually, the advantage is that a list of keywords is
attached to each package.  In order to find the appropriate
documentation, start texdoctk, click on "Database search" end enter
"rotate".  You get three suggestions, one of them describes in detail
what David Carlisle suggested.


As I mentioned before, maintaining the database is a lot of manual
work.  In order to make it more useful, volunteers are needed.  

The database (texmf-dist/texdoctk/texdoctk.dat) is a simple text file.
It contains lines

  @<category>

followed by lines

  <package name>;<description>;<path/to/file>;<keywords>

Everybody can help to improve the database.  Just send your
suggestions to tldoc at tug.org .

 * If you want to add support for an additional package, just send us
   the line to be added and tell us to which categor{y|ies} it
   belongs.  For some packages it makes sense to assign them to more
   than one category.

 * If you want to add keywords to an already supported package, tell
   us the the name of the package and the keywords you want to be
   added.

 * And if you want to take over maintenance of texdoctk, you are
   welcome.


texdoctk had originally been written for teTeX by Thomas Ruedas.
Since teTeX was much smaller than TeX Live, maintaining the database
manually was much easier.  And the number of packages on CTAN is
rapidly growing.

The TeX Live team is not able to keep the texdoctk database up-to-date
because it's to much manual work.  But if users provide improvements
to the database, I'll add them with pleasure.  Just send your
suggestions to tldoc at tug.org .

Regards,
  Reinhard


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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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