Re: Prettifying Info node (variable pitch font)

Re: Prettifying Info node (variable pitch font)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:36:10 -0400
> 
> Here is my take on prettifying Info node. Apart from looks prettier, I think it makes Info node more legible.
> 
> 1. I added variable pitch font to Info.
> 2. My prettification also takes advantage of word wrapping, so the Info node looks good in any buffer width.
> 3. Indent and everything work right.

Thanks, but I don't see how this can be done correctly in principle.
Texinfo has several types of what it calls "environments", each one of
which determines whether the produced text needs to be indented or
not, filled or not, centered or not, etc.  In the Info format produced
by 'makeinfo' that information is lost.  While you may be able to
guess the kind of "environment" in some situations, I don't see how
you could do that everywhere and with 100% accuracy.  Without that,
the result will sometimes be incorrect.  E.g., what happens with
results of @quotation or @verbatim or @display or @format or
@flushright or @caption or...?  Check out the Texinfo manual for what
effect each one of these produces in the Info manual.  It's possible
that our own manuals don't use any of these features, so you didn't
see them.  But we could use them at some future time, and other
manuals do.

The way to display the Info documentation as a Web browser would is to
work with HTML (or similar) format, not with Info format.  I believe
there's work under way as part of the Texinfo package to add such
capabilities to Texinfo.  When that is done, we will need to adapt our
Info reader to the resulting format, or maybe write a new reader from
scratch.

Re: Prettifying Info node (variable pitch font)

[Yuan Fu]

> On Jun 19, 2020, at 2:33 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:36:10 -0400
>> 
>> Here is my take on prettifying Info node. Apart from looks prettier, I think it makes Info node more legible.
>> 
>> 1. I added variable pitch font to Info.
>> 2. My prettification also takes advantage of word wrapping, so the Info node looks good in any buffer width.
>> 3. Indent and everything work right.
> 
> Thanks, but I don't see how this can be done correctly in principle.
> Texinfo has several types of what it calls "environments", each one of
> which determines whether the produced text needs to be indented or
> not, filled or not, centered or not, etc.  In the Info format produced
> by 'makeinfo' that information is lost.  While you may be able to
> guess the kind of "environment" in some situations, I don't see how
> you could do that everywhere and with 100% accuracy.  Without that,
> the result will sometimes be incorrect.  E.g., what happens with
> results of @quotation or @verbatim or @display or @format or
> @flushright or @caption or...?  Check out the Texinfo manual for what
> effect each one of these produces in the Info manual.  It's possible
> that our own manuals don't use any of these features, so you didn't
> see them.  But we could use them at some future time, and other
> manuals do.
> 

Indeed, I used some ad-hoc rules to “parse” the info file. Then the right thing for me is to make this a package for whoever is interested and can stand incorrectness here and there.

> The way to display the Info documentation as a Web browser would is to
> work with HTML (or similar) format, not with Info format.  I believe
> there's work under way as part of the Texinfo package to add such
> capabilities to Texinfo.  When that is done, we will need to adapt our
> Info reader to the resulting format, or maybe write a new reader from
> scratch.


That would be very nice. 

Yuan