Info mode - inconsistent display of cross-references

Info mode - inconsistent display of cross-references

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Emacs!

In Emacs 22.1, display the page "Getting Started" in the CC Mode manual.

The second paragraph is displayed thusly:

    You should probably start by skimming through the entire chapter
    see Commands to get an overview of CC Mode's capabilities.
    ^^^^

.  The "see " in "see Commands" is an artifact of the Info display code,
and is horrible, disgusting and ghastly.  It should not appear.

A little bit lower down on the same page, we have:

                                                            A list of
    the available styles and their descriptions can be found in
    Built-in Styles.
^^^^

Here there is no obtrusive "see " in front of "Built-in Styles", and this
is all right.

However, in the raw file  ...../info/ccmode, both of these xrefs are
coded the same way, namely "*Note Commands::" and "*Note
Built-in Styles::".  (Well, there's a linefeed in the second one, but
they're otherwise the same.)

In the source file, cc-mode.texi, both xrefs are coded correctly with the
@ref{} construct.

Whatever's going on here is surely a bug.  Both of these should be
displayed the same, _without_ the obtrusive "see ".  If this can't be
done because of limitiations in the Info format, it would surely be less
bad to display the raw "*Note Commands", since this is being honest about
Info and doesn't make the writer of the manual look incompetent.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).

Re: Info mode - inconsistent display of cross-references

[Stephen Berman]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 08:23:50 +0000 Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:

> Whatever's going on here is surely a bug.  Both of these should be
> displayed the same, _without_ the obtrusive "see ".  If this can't be
> done because of limitiations in the Info format, it would surely be less
> bad to display the raw "*Note Commands", since this is being honest about
> Info and doesn't make the writer of the manual look incompetent.

The following patch to Info-fontify-node should fix this particularly
case (but I haven't tested it).  But it's not unlikely that other
cases will have to be dealt with along the same lines, or else a
different approach is needed.

Steve Berman

*** info.el.~1.504.~	2007-08-21 11:43:23.000000000 +0200
--- info.el	2007-08-25 21:45:56.000000000 +0200
***************
*** 3844,3849 ****
--- 3844,3853 ----
  			       "")
  			      ((save-match-data (looking-back "\\<in"))
  			       "")
+ 			      ((save-match-data (looking-back "\\<chapter"))
+ 			       "")
+ 			      ((save-match-data (looking-back "\\<section"))
+ 			       "")
  			      ((memq (char-before) '(nil ?\. ?! ??))
                                 "See ")
  			      ((save-match-data

Re: Info mode - inconsistent display of cross-references

[Richard Stallman]

    The second paragraph is displayed thusly:

	You should probably start by skimming through the entire chapter
	see Commands to get an overview of CC Mode's capabilities.
	^^^^

I think the reason for this bad result is that the Texinfo was
incorrect: it used @ref in a place where you shouldn't do that.  The
fontification heuristics used by Info are tuned for the output that
comes from using these constructs as recommend; in this case, they
made it worse.

I fixed the Texinfo source.