5

I'd like to say it's great to see a compilation of packages built from answers gathered in the community. Though the project goals are explicitly defined, and I quote,

The goals are to provide good quality packages for TeX and promote the website http://tex.stackexchange.com.

I was thinking it'd be nice if we could include a tools section/directory. The motivation came from a tedious task in which I had to collect several files and organize the source codes into a manual. I wrote a single script/program to search for files matching a certain pattern and create a LaTeX file with references to them using the listings package. It's a pretty simple script, and I need to improve it, but I think it would help other people with similar tasks or eager to learn more about LaTeX and programming languages. As most of you guys do too, I usually make my codes available via opensource repositories (the script I just told you will be available as well), but I think some of these efforts could be directed to a tools directory. I understand this sugestion is not a 100% about TeX and LaTeX, but I believe it aims at them. If you guys could provide some feedback on this, it'd be nice.

1 Answer 1

6

I'd say "Yes and No" to this proposal. The "Yes" bit is to having a "tools" section. We started with TikZ purely because it was an obvious one with lots of things to choose from so the chance of success was (I judged) reasonably high. My next choice would probably be beamer, but there's no need for this to develop linearly.

The "No" bit is a bit harder to qualify. As I read it, you have a useful script that you'd like to make more available. You are to be commended for that! But my thinking is that the proper place to do that is on CTAN. I have never uploaded anything to CTAN myself so I may be wrong, but I get the impression that such contributions are very welcome.

My purpose for this "TeX-SX" package is that all the contents be linked to this site. So it's not a place to put random scripts or code. Ideally, every bit of the package should be linkable to a question or answer on the main site.

Now, that should be taken with a grain of salt. There are at least two cases that I know of where a question was asked specifically to get an answer so that some code could go in this package. And if someone is working on the package and wants to include a little extra, then that's fine by me. But whilst the boundary is fuzzy, there definitely is a boundary.

I'm just a bit wary of feature-creep. This package is partially intended as an advertisement for this site.

(Note: this is all just my personal opinion and not to be taken as definitive. Although one of the instigators of this package, I claim no ownership rights.)

1
  • 1
    Thanks a million for your feedback, Andrew. You made an insightful observation that I was unaware of. Now I understand the purpose of the TeX-SX package, I knew I was missing something important, and you made it absolutely clear. The idea of a community-driven package based on tex.sx content is amazing and tempting, and I'm eager to contribute with it. As tools are more generic in the sense of design and development, we may let them to CTAN. I'm gonna take a look on how CTAN works. Again, thanks a lot, this community is awesome! May 24, 2011 at 15:43

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .