Re: Ugly deffn

[Karl Berry]

    1. deffnx in texinfo.tex appears to have broken parsing rules: see the
       "Dragon Book" in dvi.

It sure does.  I suspect a number of the @def commands are broken in
this regard.  There are some hacks to handled multiword braced arguments
in a few cases, but I never tested it exhaustively.  Stepan and I have
been discussing it.  He is writing a new implementation of @def... for
texinfo.tex.  So, unless it's urgent for you, I'll wait ... ?

    2. the resulting of small-caps'ing cumulated with bold does not yield
       nice results neither in html nor dvi/pdf.  See STL below.

I agree, very ugly.  For TeX, it would be nicer to use one point size
smaller instead of going all the way to small caps.  Unfortunately, that
is hard to implement the way things are written now (the font problem
again ...).  And switching to a "bold small" font is even harder.

For HTML, we could <font size="-1"> to get the size right.  But the
problem with the bold is harder.  We wanted to make HTML behave like
texinfo.tex, where @address@hidden comes out in italic, not bold italic
-- there's no accumulation of font elements.  Unfortunately, that
collides with the general bold heading here.  I do not see an easy fix
offhand.

Bletch, bletch, bletch.  Thanks for the reports.  I guess :).

(Not to mention bibliographies should really be supported via BibTeX in
the first place ...)

k