From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: [drew.adams@oracle.com: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex] Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2007 19:00:10 -0500 Message-ID: <200706030000.l5300AV09602@f7.net> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1180828820 28766 80.91.229.12 (3 Jun 2007 00:00:20 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 00:00:20 +0000 (UTC) To: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Jun 03 02:00:19 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1HudW5-0004oI-M0 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 02:00:17 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1HudW5-0006cV-2W for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:00:17 -0400 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1HudW0-0006cQ-Ro for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:00:12 -0400 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1HudW0-0006cE-H3 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:00:12 -0400 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1HudW0-0006cB-AC for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:00:12 -0400 Original-Received: from server1.f7.net ([64.34.169.74] helo=f7.net) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1HudVz-0006Mp-Pk for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:00:12 -0400 X-Envelope-From: karl@freefriends.org X-Envelope-To: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-Received: (from karl@localhost) by f7.net (8.11.7-20030920/8.11.7) id l5300AV09602; Sat, 2 Jun 2007 19:00:10 -0500 In-Reply-To: X-detected-kernel: Linux 2.6, seldom 2.4 (older, 4) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:72088 Archived-At: Regarding allowing arbitary characters in node names. It seems to me that neither \: nor SGML entities are a solution. Either one involves making normal characters special (\ or &#;), which will break lots of existing documents. There are Texinfo documents which have the literal text "&123;" precisely to document whatever &123; is. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how having some simple HTML-ish output would solve the problem either. Even if we design and implement such a thing, Info output will still need to continue to exist for plenty of years to come, and therefore source documents could still not use : (or whatever) in node names. (See also my last paragraph below.) Using 0xA0 (or any other single byte value) for a quote is not a solution either, in my mind. It could have worked if it had been designed that way from the beginning, but now there are documents with a literal 0xA0 in the input. We don't want to break them. What I think has the best chance of working in the context of the current Info format is to use the same construct for arbitrary characters that we already invented for images: ^@^H[image src="somefile.png"^@^H] (the ASCII ^@ and ^H I'm writing in this email are actual NUL and BS chars in real output.) For instance, we could have ^@^H[char xxxx^@^H] where xxxx are hex digits. It would be interpreted according to whatever encoding was declared for the document. Existing viewers would obviously just display it literally, which is ugly, but I don't think it would otherwise break anything, as making new special characters would. I can't be certain without trying it, but I don't think existing viewers would bomb out if this sequence occurred in a node name. What happens on the Texinfo input side is another problem, but this message is too long already. But that means there are no faces, no graphics, no non-ASCII characters, etc. Non-ASCII characters can be included literally, since there is a provision for defining the character set. Images can now be included with the construct above. I believe this works in Emacs 22, at least I hope so, since that's why it was invented. A similar construct is used to mark indexes. One more thought: someone going to the trouble of writing a whole new viewer might as well use TexinfoML XML for its input, it seems to me (as Juri wrote). It exists today (makeinfo --xml) and has been used in a couple of real projects (e.g., http://www.nongnu.org/texi2latex/). It essentially translates Texinfo source into XML syntax, doing a few Texinfo-ish things like macro expansion and conditionals along the way. It doesn't make any layout decisions, as Info format does (and must). karl