On 11/28/12 Nov 28 -9:02 AM, Didier Verna wrote:
rpgoldman@sift.info wrote:
As far as I can tell, this is a misfeature of texinfo. The links only work to the node level (at least in the info browser). So we would need to reactor the document into smaller nodes to fix that.
That's not really a misfeature. That fact is that Texinfo uses nodes as its primary sectionning mechanism. You need to think in terms of node first when you write Texinfo. Every sectionning command that you use should be associated with a node, and every node that has sub-nodes should have a menu. It seems that you only have nodes for chapters, which explains the shaky TOC.
This is a fair criticism, however Faré and I inherited the chapter-based organization, and refactoring texinfo seems like a lot of work.
It would be worth redesigning the information flow at the same time if we were to restructure. Notably the discussion of the object model is incomplete and somewhat messy. There isn't a clear description of protocols for extending the object model. It would be very nice to have that.
Cheers, r
Unfortunately, in addition to requiring some work, that would also give us a document with very small pages, that would be a nuisance when attempting to read in chunks (as opposed to jumping to a very specific item).
That is correct, although I don't find that this is such a nuisance, since you have all the hyperlinks you want. Otherwise, what you can do is generate a single web page for the whole doc (Cf. --no-split).
It's a nuisance if you read the info pages in emacs. You get choppy little bites instead of any kind of sensible flow. E.g., to be able to jump to a single function's documentation specifically, you have to sacrifice the ability to have a screen that shows three related functions together. Unless I am missing something (I hope I am).
This can be somewhat ameliorated by making a single-page HTML document, or using PDF, but even then the screens seem impoverished.
It would be nice if texinfo offered links to more specific locations than nodes, but it sounds like that's not available.
Best, r