Free stuff

I intend to put some small hacks and other stuff which might be useful for other people here for free. Until now, there is not too much here, though.

texdoctk

Current version: 0.5.2 beta 3 (February 2, 2003)
Important: As of v.0.5.2 beta 3, texdoctk is a part of Thomas Esser's teTeX distribution, and is designed for use with this distribution or derivates thereof. At present, I do not provide up-to-date version of texdoctk here, so the texdoctk coming with teTeX is currently the one to be used. I might provide an up-to-date source here when I have time to provide a new release.
texdoctk is a GUI for easier access of a large part of the vast amount of package and program documentations and tutorials for TeX and its different derivates (mainly LaTeX). It is written in Perl/Tk and assumes that you are using some kind of Unix; you will need Perl 5 and Perl/Tk 8.x to use it. The database files used by it are made for the teTeX v.1.0.x distributions of TeX.
Note that the program is not a viewer, but an interface to access a document with the appropriate viewer; see a screenshot to get an idea. Thus, you need to have appropriate viewers for the different formats to actually read the files; if you want to use the printing feature, you will also need appropriate something-to-ps-converters, such as dvips (part of teTeX anyway), Acrobat Reader, html2ps and a2ps.
The documentation is grouped into 17 categories; the 18th button of the main panel is inactive by default. If you have special documents which do not fit into any of the categories, you can append an 18th block to the database file with the respective entries. A simple keyword search is possible.
texdoctk is put under the GNU Public License and can be downloaded from this site as a gzipped tarfile (B) or from the CTAN. Former versions 0.3.0 and 0.4.0 are also still available; v.0.5.0/0.5.0a contained bugs and are therefore not offered here, please upgrade if you installed them. Note that the current version is not available here, but through the teTeX download sites.

xtrcode

Current version: 0.2 (Jan 12, 2000)
This is a small Perl program I originally made when I was writing a program documentation for a large program consisting of several files; I wanted to extract the code out of the LaTeX verbatim environments containing the whole code portionwise and have it put into a file which could then be compiled directly. This is how it works:

xtrcode <options> texfile <codefile>

Options:
-a - extract all code; this is for code which is supposed to be distributed over different target files, so do not use it together with codefile
-eenvironment - extract content of environment; default is [Vv]erbatim
-ppattern - marker pattern for environments to extract; default is %%@. A null pattern is possible.
-h - show help

You can download it together with a short documentation as a tar.gz file (B); it is available under the GNU Public License.
In the following I assume that texfile is a program documentation.
codefile:
xtrcode texfile codefile searches for a marker pattern followed by a blank and codefile and copies the content of the following environment into the target file codefile. This can be used to extract only the contents corresponding to a certain part of the program instead of the whole lot. - If no codefile is given, the default output file is "xtrcode.out".
Option -a:
xtrcode -a texfile extracts all contents of an environment from texfile and writes it into the standard output file "xtrcode.out". This is useful if you have program code which is intended to come into separate files; when documenting it you will use a kind of extra pattern line, e.g.
%%@ code1.f preceding each verbatim environment containing parts of code1.f, and similarly with the other files. With the -a option, xtrcode will interpret code1.f as the name of the file which shall contain the content of the following environment, and will copy the contents of all environments of the selected type into the respective target files. - The use of a marker pattern is necessary here, and no codefile should be specified.
Option -e:
xtrcode -eenvironment texfile searches for environment instead of the default verbatim or Verbatim.
Option -p:
xtrcode -ppattern texfile uses pattern instead of the default %%@ as a marker. If -p is used without a pattern, no marker patterns are taken into account.
If there are nested environments of the same type, the outermost is assumed to be the one to extract.
Thomas Ruedas / ruedas@geophysik.uni-frankfurt.de / Last updated:
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