Texdoc ― Find and view documentation in TeX Live

General Information

• Website: https://www.tug.org/texdoc/
• Repository: https://github.com/TeX-Live/texdoc/
• Mailing list: [email protected]

Using Texdoc

Texdoc is part of the TeX Live distribution. Generally, you don't have to install it yourself.

If you want to try/test the develop version, please see below.

How to Install the Develop Version

Using Bundler

The easiest way to install the develop version of Texdoc is using Bundler and Rake:

bundle install
rake install

If you want to uninstall the develop version (to use the TeX Live version), just try:

rake uninstall

Installing manually

Here, $TEXDOC means the path to the texdoc dev sources you cloned (or downloaded), and $TEXMFHOME denotes your personal TEXMF tree (you can get its location with kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFHOME).

• The command. Symlink or copy $TEXDOC/script as $TEXMFHOME/scripts/texdoc.
• The configuration file. Symlink or copy $TEXDOC/texdoc.cnf as $TEXMFHOME/texdoc/texdoc-dist.cnf (notice the -dist part). It will completely override the other configuration files except $TEXMFHOME/texdoc/texdoc.cnf which you can still use for you personal settings.

You can make sure that the right files are used by running texdoc --files: the first line contains the full path to the version of used texdoclib.tlu, and the rest lists the configuration files in use.

Files in This Repository

• doc/ contains the documentation,
• script/ contains the source code,
• spec/ is a directory for testing scripts, and
• texdoc.cnf is the default configuration file.

Building and Testing

Many building tasks are defined as Rake tasks.

Generating all documentation

The following will generate both the PDF and the manpage in doc/ directory.

rake doc

Generating a pre-hashed cache file

The following will generate a pre-hashed cache file script/Data.tlpdb.lua. This task have to be done under a TeX Live setup with tlpdb.

rake gen_datafile

Running tests

The following will run all tests in spec/ directory.

rake test

Alternatively, you can give spec names with the --list (-l) option for this task. E.g., following will run only spec/action/help_spec.rb and spec/mode/list_spec.rb:

rake test -- -l action/help,mode/list

Showing all available tasks

Following will show all available tasks with a short description.

rake -T

In addition to that, for options available tasks, e.g., rake test and rake run_texdoc, you can get options information with -h option for each task:

rake test -- -h

Further Information

More specific information, such as the TODO list of this project and some information for distributors, can be found in the Wiki of our GitHub repository. Please visit:

• https://github.com/TeX-Live/texdoc/wiki

Copyright and License

Copyright 2008-2025 Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard, Takuto Asakura, the TeX Live Team.

This package is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Previous work (texdoc program) in the public domain:

• Contributions from Reinhard Kotucha (2008).
• First texlua versions by Frank Küster (2007).
• Original shell script by Thomas Esser, David Aspinall, and Simon Wilkinson.