Re: Unadorned cross-references

[Augusto Stoffel]

On Thu,  3 Jun 2021 at 10:45, Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 06:18:57PM +0200, Augusto Stoffel wrote:
>> 
>> Moreover, the above is not due to any fundamental issue, but rather to
>> the very prosaic problem that Texinfo is missing a plain cross-reference
>> markup.
>
> I may be missing something, but it seems to me that @ref{} is more or
> less the plain cross-reference markup command in Texinfo (in addition to
> @url{}).

This is a good point.  However, @ref and @xref generate the same output
in the info files, which is problematic.

Thus, the example in the @ref entry of the manual, namely

        For more information, @pxref{This}, and @ref{That}.

renders as follows in Emacs:

        For more information, see This, and see That.

while the author's intention was to say

        For more information, see This, and That.

Can we agree this is a problem?

> Info is a different issue, the cross-references are described formally in
> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Cross-Reference.html
> and indeed, there is no plain cross-reference.

I hope the above example convinces people that this is an undesirable
limitation, even if Texinfo is "done" and will not be fixed.