Recently, when peeking over the shoulder of someone who has years of experience working with TeX, I saw him type something into the terminal that caused a pdf with the documentation for a LaTeX package we were working with to open. I asked if he had a central utility for finding the documentation for a package, his answer was: "Yes, it's called texdoc
, look into it." We then kept doing our thing, and since his time for me is limited, I didn't further inquire and figured I'd find out on my own.
And so I tried, but can't seem to get the hang of it. I have a full working installation of TeX Live 2012 set up, and get this output:
$ texdoc
/usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/i386-linux/texdoc:7: module 'texdoc.main' not found:
no field package.preload['texdoc.main']
[kpse lua searcher] file not found: 'texdoc.main'
[kpse C searcher] file not found: 'texdoc.main'
[kpse All-in-one searcher] file not found: 'texdoc'
So apparently something is missing or not configured, as far as I can tell. I made sure that I had also installed the documentation, and tlmgr
confirmed this. Considering this mentor of mine is already an older gentleman, is this software maybe outdated? Or (what seems more plausible) am I just doing it wrong?
Follow-up problem 1 [solved]
Thanks to David Carlisle's answer, I seem to have resolved the issue of texdoc
not working properly. However, now all I get is the following:
~$ texdoc geometry
Sorry, no documentation found for geometry.
If you are unsure about the name, try searching CTAN's TeX catalogue at
http://ctan.org/search.html#byDescription.
EDIT/SOLVED: Since I had installed the medium
scheme originally, there was no documentation for all the packages that were downloaded then. A reinstallation of TeXLive fixed that problem.
texdoc geometry
texdoc -l amsmath
(the-l
is key). on the system i'm using, this returns 15 files, with full path, and asks the user to choose one (or not).amsmath
is a "required" package, so if documentation has been installed, you should get a "sensible" response; if nothing is found, then it's very likely that themedium
scheme did not install documentation. not sure whether it's possible to install only documentation files separately.tex/latex
branch is; there should be a parallel branchdoc/latex
, and package documentation should be there. if that branch is missing, no doc. (cont'd)