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Tips for the Search

TL;DR: the extended search tries to interprete some words and characters specially. This is not just Google.

The CTAN search provides some powerful features to express the query. You can use these features to get better results. Some of the features are described here. This feature list is by far not complete. It will be extended when required.

Prefix Search

The search term is split into words. The search engine finds the items containing all search terms at the beginning of words. The comparison is performed case-insensitive.

This is the same as adding the wildcard character * to the end of all words.

Word-based Search

The search term is split into words. The search engine finds the items containing all search terms as words. The order of the words just influences the order of the hits. The comparison is performed case-insensitive.

Wildcard Search

The meta-characters * and ? can be contained in the search term to denote an arbitrary number of characters and a single character respective.

bibtool*

Note that wildcards are not allowed at the beginning of a word.

Excluding words

Prefixing a word by - or NOT (in upper case) will exclude all hits for this word from the results.

sudoku -related

sudoku NOT related

Boolean Combinations

A boolean query can be formulated with the operators AND, OR, and NOT. Parentheses can be used to group sub-expressions.

tex AND NOT knuth

Fuzzy Search

If you are not sure about the spelling of your search you can initiate a fuzzy search. For this purpose append a ~ to the search word. This search also returns hits which are not literal matches but variations thereof.

bibtol~

Note that fuzzy search usually returns lots of hits. Thus be careful.