latexmlc does not open the documentation

[matteosecli]

Up to a few weeks ago, the commands latexml* --help used to print the help directly in the terminal.

Then, the behavior changed into printing just the version information and opening the man page (which is fine for me). On the latest git version & Ubuntu 14.04, the commands latexml --help and latexmlpost --help are equivalent to man latexml and man latexmlpost (at least, on my system).

However, latexmlc does not follow this behavior. The command latexmlc --help just prints the version number on the terminal and nothing else. If I try to access the man page via man latexmlc, I get a quite scant manpage with the following synopsis:

SYNOPSYS
       See the OPTIONS section in LaTeXML::Common::Config for usage
       information.
         Also consult latexmlc --help

To get a clue of what the options for latexmlc are, I have to type man LaTeXML::Common::Config and go through a couple of screens before getting into the section "OPTION SYNOPSIS" that indeed describes the options for latexmls/latexmlc.

I think this is not really "user friendly", since it makes quite hard for a user to find the information he is looking for. It would be nice, imho, to

• at least redirect latexmlc --help to man latexmlc, as it already happens with latexml and latexmlpost;
• create a separate manpage for latexmlc, as it used to be a few weeks ago (afair).

I hope this is not just a problem with my configuration, so let me kindly know if you can reproduce the bug.

[dginev]

I think latexmlc never printed the full help on screen. It's a bit of a tricky thing there, since I've been meaning to reuse the POD in Common::Config, but I never found out how without copying it verbatim.

So this is not a regression, latexmlc has always been a little different is all. It's a good request to make this better.

[dginev]

In the end you were right - I actually had some smart code in place that was displaying the synopsis from Common::Config on latexmlc --help. But as I rearranged the docs, the selector failed. Pull request is now in - should be fixed soon.

Thanks for the report, very helpful!

[matteosecli]

Glad it's been helpful! 😃
I've just tested the latest revision and indeed now latexmlc --help displays the options as expected.