Re: Divergence in menu appearance between Emacs Info and standalone Info

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    One idea is to take out the Emacs feature that hides this text, so the
    text becomes visible again.  

I'm afraid that I have some sympathy for this approach, despite the work
that's gone into it.  I recognize that the node names are, in some
sense, `extra' information and removing them makes for fewer things for
the reader to see.  That much is good.  But the downside is that Texinfo
is completely based on node names, and hiding them seems to me like it
could easily cause more confusion than it solves.

In the example at hand,
* Foo: A Node about Foo: ...
the user will select `Foo', but then end up at `A Node about Foo', with
no real way of making the connection between them.

    Another idea is to change the stand-alone
    Info to hide this text too, and then change info.texi accordingly.

I won't be able to do this myself any time soon.  However, I'll ask the
other Info programmer volunteers if they'd like to work on it.

    A third option is to put conditionals into info.texi and have
    two versions of it, one for Emacs and one for standalone info.
    But I think that divergence is probably a bad idea.

I don't like the divergent conditionals either.  However, I think it
would be ok to simply say in info.texi, `Emacs Info does it this way,
and standalone Info does it that way'.  I think that would be clear to
users of both programs.  Better than (effectively) having two different
manuals with the same name, anyway.

    What do you think?

I gather the default is to hide the node names.  Because of the problems
above, I suggest making the default to show them, i.e., the traditional
behavior.

Also, from previous mail, I think that node names can also now be hidden
in xrefs?  Anywhere else?  The Texinfo manual will also need to mention
this new feature, lest authors be confused when Emacs does not show them
what the manual says to expect.

Thanks,
karl