a great thing about Suse used to be the Latex documentation: One great overview page,
with sections for the package groups, overviews what the packages were doing, and links
to the package documentation.
With 11.4 I believe I have installed everything Latex-related, but no real documentation, that
is:
/usr/lib/texmf/doc/texlive/index.html
contains the usual administrative stuff, mostly not useful. In the middle of the page one finds
Available package documentation (some 1200 entries).
which links to
file:///usr/lib/doc.html
which simply doesn’t exist.
This is likely a bug (which was already there in 11.3). Is it possible to create the page?
Actually, I fear that page will not live up to the standards of the old Suse documentation.
I guess it will be just a big index-page, without real information.
If a know which package is to be used, then I can find information on the Internet
(and there is the package-documentation).
The real value of the old documentation page was the overview gained, the information added
(to the raw list of data). Is such a page somewhere?
AFAIK this page was part of TeTeX which was discontinued some years ago after which openSUSE switched to Texlive. Though it is intended for a different purpose, if you want detailed discussion of LaTeX packages beyond the basics, install LyX and consult its extensive documentation.
Thanks for the tip. I now looked into the various pieces of Lyx documentation, but it all seemed pretty much
embedded into their system. And especially regarding Latex packages I couldn’t find documentation.
(In Yast I entered “lyx” and everything is installed which shows up there (which includes the community
repositories).)
The information about LaTeX packages is buried in the various part of the LyX help; a lot depends on what you are looking for; a lot of it is discussion of the pros and cons of using a particular package but there is, for example, discussion on the colour and maths packages, documentation on braile, multicol and various other packages like enumitem, initials and so on.
Obviously, because it is written for LyX users, it is not the LaTeX documentation as such but it is written by people with a lot of experience of using LaTeX in practice and the key options are specified in such a way that I have generally been able to use LaTeX packages not directly supported by LyX without any problems.