Re: Refilling overrides texinfo commands

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     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.
> 
> You are right.
> 
> So I have gone back to my conclusion of a week ago, that we should
> stop refilling paragraphs in Info.  When some xref text is hidden, the
> line will be shorter.  That looks a little strange, but it is not
> really wrong.  When refilling is done, the results can be positively
> wrong.

I agree.  Rather than completely removing the refilling, I have added
a new variable Info-refill-paragraphs (default disabled) with suitable
warnings about its potential ill effects.

Take a look at the end of "(texinfo)makeinfo in Emacs" for a really
extreme example of how bad the text can look _without_ refilling.



> 
>     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.
> 
> Perhaps makeinfo is fast enough now that we could stop installing
> Info files and have them regenerated when users want them.
> If so, we could have an option to generate them in various ways
> (hiding xrefs, showing xrefs, etc).

We could do that always, provided that the result is cached.

However, we would then require specific (very new) versions of
makeinfo to be installed on the user's system.  That would be a
problem for many users.

So I think we should still install info files as a fall-back, and only
require to run makeinfo when some option (like
Info-hide-note-references) is explicitly turned on.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk