Re: rethinking @def*

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 05:07:50PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > I had thought that @code could be forced to be upright on
> > a slanted @def line, at least.  Whether it should be upright everywhere
> > else doesn't really matter; we could go with what is the easiest to
> > implement.  It's probably safest just to keep it to the @def line.
> 
> I'd hoped we could consider more about where @var should be in
> a variable width font.  I'm still tempted to make it unconditionally
> slanted roman everywhere (in LaTeX output, not HTML output).

That would be ok to me.  This is already like that for @cite, and it
somehow makes sense to me to consider that the formatting of @var should
be invariant everywhere, given what it represents.  It could be slanted
typewriter or slanted roman, but everywhere the same seems the best to
me.

There should be a possibility to do slanted typewriter explicitely on
@def* lines, but it could be with @r{@t{@slanted{...}}}.

> Since @var on a def line is a more important use case than @code, if
> we didn't special case @var then it wouldn't be worth special casing
> @code there either.  Then we could avoid layering hacks upon hacks.  I
> suspect it would be cumbersome to make the interaction with embrac
> 100% correct.

It would need a bit more code, definitely doable, better if not needed.

> If people wanted upright @code on a slanted @def line then there would
> be other ways to achive this, like doing @r{@code{...}}, or using
> @deftype without a type.

I agree, in general this should not be needed for the reasons you
said.  I will give another one, in general it is not a good idea to use
@code to mark anything on a @def* line, as it adds quotes in Info which
will be confusing for many programming languages.  That being said, the
replacement would be @r{@t{...}} which is also a nesting of commands.

-- 
Pat