bug#58532: 29.0.50; Support displaying imenu entries in a separate buffer

[Jose A. Ortega Ruiz]

On Wed, Oct 19 2022, Juri Linkov wrote:

>> It'd be great if imenu supported displaying its alist of entries in a
>> separate buffer.  This is particularly useful when the list of entries
>> has many levels (for example, it is the table of contents of a PDF,
>
> Unfortunately, mupdf/mutool doesn't support Unicode characters:
> https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=702358
> Maybe doc-view--pdf-outline could post-process the output
> to replace hex-encoded numbers with their character equivalents?

i wasn't aware of this mutool limitation when i wrote that function; if
the encoding is good enough, yes, we could do that: i'll send a patch,
unless someone already did.  hmmm, do somebody have a good example of a
PDF with lots of unicode in its section titles?

>
>> supported in Emacs 29), because you could search for an entry very
>> easily.  Right now, pressing C-s in the minibuffer only searches for
>> first-level imenu entries.
>>
>> I suggest the new buffer would be configured in outline-mode, which is
>> suited for this kind of hierarchical content.
>
> The problem is that imenu-submenus-on-top is t by default,

that seems minor... one could always regenerate the index with
imenu-submenus-on-top set to nil when the export is requested?

jao
-- 
There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation,
naming things, and off-by-one errors.