Re: pxref

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:03:40 -0500
> From: karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>     Specifically, in the new Info default, @xref does not always produce a
>     capitalized "See".  This means a change in documentation.
> 
> Sorry, I have no background for and don't understand any of this.  How
> can such a fundamental thing about Texinfo be changed?  Who did it and
> why?  Why should "Info" (do you mean info.el?) be downcasing/upcasing
> "See" (last I knew it was *[nN]ote" in Info, anyway, not "[sS]ee"])?
> 
> As far as I know neither makeinfo nor texinfo.tex have changed in this
> regard.  Also, it is not feasible to change texinfo.tex in any such way,
> if I'm understanding right.  (Messing with stuff based on surrounding
> text.)

Karl, you are absolutely right: there's no need to change anything in
Texinfo.  There's a huge misunderstanding here, mainly due to the fact
that Bob insists on saying that some ``new Info default'' changed what
@xref produces.

The reality is that @xref still produces the same output as it did
_in_the_Info_file, except that the Emacs Info reader displays the
leading "*Note" as "[Ss]ee", and hides the explicit reference to the
Info node and file, leaving just the reference name.  This was done to
make the cross-references look more like hyperlinks in other GUI
applications.

This is only a display trickery; info.el does not change the text read
from the Info file, it just uses the Emacs display features to display
certain text as a something different.  Thus, if one copies from the
buffer to another one, they will still see the same "*Note" and the
full cross-reference as makeinfo produces.