Add anchors in HTML documentation

Add anchors in HTML documentation

[Christian Miller]

Hello,

it would be a nice feature to have actual anchors in the HTML
documentation.  I mean with that, that there is an anchor symbol which
upon clicking, copies the exact URL to this section in the HTML
documentation.

This is useful, since currently I always need to go to the top of the
documentation (Table of Contents) to grab the URL that jumps to the
corresponding section, which I paste in the #Guix IRC channel as
pointer on how to do specifc things.

Can we maybe even do this not only for whole sections, but also for
things like "console-font-service-type".  For example if someone asks
how to install TTY fonts.

Best Regards
Christian Miller

Re: Add anchors in HTML documentation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Christian Miller <christian.miller@dadoes.de> skribis:

> it would be a nice feature to have actual anchors in the HTML
> documentation.  I mean with that, that there is an anchor symbol which
> upon clicking, copies the exact URL to this section in the HTML
> documentation.
>
> This is useful, since currently I always need to go to the top of the
> documentation (Table of Contents) to grab the URL that jumps to the
> corresponding section, which I paste in the #Guix IRC channel as
> pointer on how to do specifc things.
>
> Can we maybe even do this not only for whole sections, but also for
> things like "console-font-service-type".  For example if someone asks
> how to install TTY fonts.

There are anchors for index entries, but you typically need to jump to
<https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Programming-Index.html>
to get the link, or to click on the symbol in a code snippet.

I agree that anchor symbols in the text would help.  We’d need to tweak
the Texinfo output and/or use @anchor more frequently in the Texinfo
source of the manual.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Add anchors in HTML documentation

[Christian Miller]

Hi,

> There are anchors for index entries, but you typically need to jump to
> <https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Programming-Index.html>
> to get the link, or to click on the symbol in a code snippet.

I did not think about that.  This is even better than what I did.

> I agree that anchor symbols in the text would help.  We’d need to tweak
> the Texinfo output and/or use @anchor more frequently in the Texinfo
> source of the manual.

It should do it automatically instead of using @anchor everytime,
since this would be repetitive.  I also saw that Emacs has sometimes
the same problem.  If this affects Texinfo to generate a different
output, we may should move it to the Texinfo ML (do they have one?).
Therefore not only Guix would profit from it.

-- 
Christian Miller