Re: Display of cross references to other manuals

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   Looking at the Texinfo manual in Emacs, in node Top Node Naming, I see

       Thus, to make a cross reference to `The GNU Make Manual', write:

            @xref{Top, , Overview, make, The GNU Make Manual}.

       which produces

            See Overview.

   (The actual text in the Info file is `See *Note Overview: (make)Top.')

   Displaying it this way is confusing because it doesn't show that this
   is a reference another manual.  Perhaps the invisibility should be
   limited to ordinary within-manual references.

   What do you think?

Should we not discuss this on emacs-devel instead?  The standalone
Info does not hide any part of the reference.  Looking at the same
node either in standalone Info or in Emacs Info with
Info-hide-note-references set to nil, we see:

    which produces

         *Note Overview: (make)Top.

So I believe that this is an issue peculiar to Emacs Info with
Info-hide-note-references set to t.  Note that a patch submitted to
emacs-devel by Juri Linkov in December would have produced:

       which produces

            Overview(top).

(in Emacs Info with Info-hide-note-references set to t).

There was one aspect of Juri's many proposed changes that I personally
did not like (guessing the place inside the node to go to, rather than
going to the top), but several other parts looked useful.  In as far
as I can see, no part got installed.

Sincerely,

Luc.