Re: Refilling overrides texinfo commands

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
   
   I have another solution to propose:

   1. Change the standalone info to hide the same text as Emacs info does.

   2. Change Makeinfo to recognize when filling that that text will be
      hidden.

That would have the negative effect of effectively disabling
Info-hide-note-references and making the text-hiding "mandatory"
instead of having it as an optional feature.  Several people prefer
not to have the information in question hidden and they have valid
reasons for that.

I have the impression that some people on this list believe that the
only reason one could probably want to have Info-hide-note-references
set to anything else but t is to satisfy some strange ideological
obsession.  This is extremely far from the truth.  I am not speaking
in the abstract here.  I am using Info extensively.  For instance, I
used Info recently to learn Texinfo.  I was reluctant to just set
Info-hide-note-references to nil, because I am rewriting parts of the
tutorial and for that reason, I prefer to use all-default settings in
Info.  But I tended to leave vis-mode on in the presence of
cross-references.  The reason is that several cross-references in the
Texinfo manual led to the Emacs manual.  Knowing that information
saved me the time and trouble to follow these cross-references: I
already knew that stuff anyway.  Similar situations occur in various
other manuals I studied using Info.

Also, if we want to maximize quality of appearance to the fullest then
there are tons of things we might want to do.  _This is really
important stuff_ would look a lot better if it were written in the
font used by texinfo-mode than enclosed in _..._. Same for *...*.  It
would look nicer if @code, @kbd and several others would yield
different fonts and/or colors, rather than all being enclosed in
`...'.  Same for various different stuff enclosed in "...".  In the
case of @code, @kbd and the like, and even for _..._ and *...*, the
information can not be reliably recovered from the Info file, but it
is all in the source file.  (I am not familiar with XML and DocBook.)

So one question is: how far do we want to go longer term?  Is the
current hiding and refilling a first step to "better things to come"?
Are we happy with the Info format for the long term or do we want a
separate "Emacs format"?

I believe that trying to reformat Info files, as currently being
attempted, makes no sense.  Info is an output format, not a mark up
language.  Texinfo is a mark up language.  So are XML and DocBook.

Sincerely,

Luc.