extended @uref command? (was: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 6, Issue 5)

extended @uref command? (was: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 6, Issue 5)

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, May 03 2003, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I think it's better to use @uref with 2 arguments here, like this:
>
>    @uref{http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html, The Emacs
>    Lisp List (ELL)}, maintained by
>
> The results will look better in HTML, for example.

ACK.  But in the printed version (produced with texi2dvi) looks like
this:

| The Emacs Lisp List (ELL)
| (http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html)

Especially with long URLs, this isn't very readable and often leeds to
`underfull \hbox'es.

Therefore, I use a macro @rsuref, producing a footnote in non-html
output:

@macro rsuref{url,text}
@ifhtml
@uref{\url\,\text\}@c
@end ifhtml
@ifnothtml
\text\@footnote{@uref{\url\} (\text\)}@c
@end ifnothtml
@end macro

Would it make sense to add a similar command (say @furef{url,text}) in
texinfo (or extend @uref{})?

Cc: & Mail-Followup-To: help-texinfo@gnu.org

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: extended @uref command? (was: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 6, Issue 5)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de>
> Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 19:57:24 +0200
> 
> ACK.  But in the printed version (produced with texi2dvi) looks like
> this:
> 
> | The Emacs Lisp List (ELL)
> | (http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html)
> 
> Especially with long URLs, this isn't very readable and often leeds to
> `underfull \hbox'es.

It is a long-standing issue with Texinfo to teach it to hyphenate
URLs.  I hope some day this will be solved.

> Therefore, I use a macro @rsuref, producing a footnote in non-html
> output:

This was suggested in the past, perhaps even by you.  Personally, I
don't like this solution, but that's me.

Re: extended @uref command? (was: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 6, Issue 5)

[Karl Berry]

    and often leeds to `underfull \hbox'es.

True enough.  As Eli says, I hope to make url's breakable in TeX at some
point.  Unfortunately the url.sty and hyperref packages aren't usable as
is, because Texinfo has to parse the arguments differently.

    \text\@footnote{@uref{\url\} (\text\)}@c

I appreciate that this can help with the line breaking.  But in my
opinion, having lots of footnotes with url's is distracting to the
reader (having just reviewed several papers written in that style), so I
don't especially want to add this to the base Texinfo.

Thanks,
karl