texdoc and TEXDOCVIEW_pdf

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Thu Dec 29 09:42:24 UTC 2005


texdoc is a shell script from tetex.

By default for viewing pdf files that are part of the tex documentation,
it wants to use xpdf.

xpdf is no longer installed by default, so a user is required to either
install it - or set the TEXDOCVIEW_pdf environmental variable themselves
to something else (like evince) - otherwise they get an xpdf command not
found error.

This would be nice to resolve for FC5 if it can be properly done.

Would it be better to install something in /etc/profile.d/ that sets
TEXDOCVIEW_pdf to something like gnome-open?

That should still allow the a user to put in their own TEXDOCVIEW_pdf if
they wanted to, but would use their default pdf reader if they didn't
set anything themselves.

This may need to be done for more than just the TEXDOCVIEW_pdf
environmental variable, but I think something needs to be done to avoid
texdoc complaining about a lack of xpdf when a perfectly good PDF viewer
(such as evince or Acrobat) is installed. It also seems like it should
use the users preferred application for viewing PDF files.

Only potential issue I can think of would be KDE users etc. who don't
have gnome-open installed. A standard wrapper that uses the appropriate
viewer for the desktop being used would be better, if such a thing
exists (since tetex is not a gnome app).




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