Re: printing issues

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 10:20:05 +0100 (CET)
> 
> There is an obvious difference between an electronic book and a
> printed version of it.  My personal opinion is that it is good to have
> a single large electronic version which becomes multiple volumes if
> printed.

Are you talking about a single file for a particular manual, or do you
mean you want to have a single Info file with _all_ the manuals?  That
is, do you want one file for Make, another for Emacs, yet another for
GDB, or do you want one Info file for all of these?

> Another reason for a single large electronic version is the
> inability of the stand-alone info program to look up a keyword (be it
> with the `i' or `C-s' command) in more than a single info file -- at
> least I don't know how to do that.

I think "M-x index-apropos" is what you want.  But the question only
makes sense to me if you want to look in several manuals.  `i' does
very well with a single manual, even if it is divided into subfiles;
if you have problems with that, please tell the details.

> How can I achieve this with texinfo in a smart way?  I would like to
> have something like the following:
> 
>   electronic: Part 1
>               Part 2
>               Appendix A
>               Appendix B
>               Index
> 
>   printed: vol 1: Part 1
>                   Appendix A
>                   Index of vol 1
>            vol 2: Part 2
>                   Appendix B
>                   Index of vol 2

Is subdividing the indices the main problem here?  Or is there
something else?

If you need to divide the indices, you could define several indices
(with @defindex), and then conditionally combine them (with
@synindex) depending on some -D switch to makeinfo.  The downside of
this is that you will have to use a different indexation command for
entries in different volumes.  If that's an annoyance, I suppose you
could use @alias to alleviate that to some extent.