Hi pdftex team, a user of our Debian package containing pdftex suggested some changes to the man page, along the lines of the text displayed with "pdftex --help". Dan Jacobson wrote: [I pointed him to the sentence that refers the user to the "info file or manual Web2C]

f> The complete documentation for this version of TeX can be found f> in the info file ... $ info pdftex gets the manpage.

Wait, I see, you should say

The complete documentation for this version of TeX can be found in the Info manual Web2C: A TeX implementation.

or something like that.

You see, the "or" between 'info file' and 'manual' could be understand in the sense that there are two files.

f> What wording would you suggest?

SYNOPSIS should agree with --help:

pdftex [OPTION]... [TEXNAME[.tex]] [COMMANDS]

The TEXNAME[.tex] part is missing currently. Probably it's better to use pdftex [options] [TeX-commands] [texname[.tex] | TeX-commands] to indicate that one can combine TeX-commands at the beginning with an input file.

[or use lower case.]

The help message with its uppercase arguments is probably from one of Knuth's files, isn't it?

Indeed, you could move the pdftex --help section running from

Run pdfTeX on TEXNAME, usually creating TEXNAME.pdf. to If no arguments or options are specified, prompt for input.

to the man page, because it rather belongs there.

Sorry, no patch - I don't understand how pdftex.man is generated from the m4 file. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie