Re: generate 2) other pages for Info

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

>> The problem of not being able to find "revert" when we look for
>> "refresh" should be solved by a personal help manager, not by the
>> navigation system through the documentation.
>
> Could you elaborate why do you think this should be solved by a
> personal help manager?  

Let's take an example.  

Imagine someone is looking for the command that add a ChangeLog entry.
Here are a few different searching paths he might go through:

1. His first reflex is to go to the Emacs manual. Great! It's there.

2. He thinks he can use `finder-by-keyword' (C-h P) for that. If he is
   brave enough to go to the end of the list, he will find "tools", then
   add-log.el, then he will stumble on "This facility is documented in
   the Emacs Manual." Okay, then he should have gone there first.

3. He is used to `apropos-command' (C-h a). He tries that and look for
   "ChangeLog". Bad luck. He will find this:

   log-edit-add-to-changelog     M-x ... RET
   log-edit-insert-changelog     M-x ... RET
   
   He didn't look for "log" because he thought there would be too many
   matches (in fact, the first match for this query is okay.)

   Let's say that he finally found `add-change-log-entry'. Now he might
   want to find documentation using `Info-goto-emacs-command-node' but
   C-h F add-change-log-entry doesn't yield any result (though C-h F
   add-change-log-entry-other-window).

In all these three scenarii, all that the user want to access to is:
"add a changelog entry" -> "the Change Log manual page in Emacs manual".

Scenario 1 is obviously the best one here, but that may not be always
the case. He might have to go through something like 2 or 3 for other
queries. In fact, different kinds of information live in different
places and it would be nice to have a separate place for information
that we *already found* in the past. 

So here is what a personal help manager could store:

| searched              | found                | manual                    |
|-----------------------+----------------------+---------------------------|
| Add a ChangeLog entry | add-change-log-entry | (info "(emacs)Change Log) |

(This is actually what I'm trying to use inside my org-mode file.)

> As I see, in a PIM the user adds a link (or a bookmark) to the
> information that the user has already found.

This is it.

> But how this will help to find a new information? 

This won't. But this will be a way not to lose information we already
found.

> I think only adding various index entries including most synonyms
> (e.g. "revert", "refresh", "update", ...) will help to find the entry.

The main job of the personal help manager would be to be able to find
these synonyms. I guess different people would use different synonyms
sets (not mentionning language-dependant issues).

-- 
Bastien