Re: [help-texinfo] Re: Dividing a texinfo document into parts?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Brooks,

    The GNU Fortran compiler front-end for GCC.  

Way cool.

    probably, separating that all off into a \partentryfonts macro), but 

Yeah.

    that doesn't actually change anything.  What am I missing?

I'm not sure.  The font stuff is a horrible kludge anyway.
If you found a way that works, be happy :).

    That looks pretty reasonable, and I'd be happy with it, though if the 
    "whatever else" is ignored by makeinfo I wouldn't want to put too much 
    text there.

Yeah.  I was just imagining that people might want a quote or a picture
or something on the part pages.  There's no need for the whole "page"
approach if we only care about supporting the "Part X: My first part"
lines.

   @part This is my first part
   @node A chapter
   @chapter A chapter

Well, as written there, it'd be fine, if we have makeinfo ignore it.  It
doesn't allow for the extraneous text, but it is simpler, and probably
sufficient in the vast majority of cases (including yours, right?).

However, there are problems with setting it up as a "normal" sectioning
level that creates a node, with general text following, as in:

  @node My first part
  @part My first part

  My first part is to the left.
  
  @menu
  * Chap::
  @end menu

  @node Chap
  @chapter Chap

The main problem is that it is unlike all the other sectioning levels in
that it may or not be present.  makeinfo has a lot of junk that tries to
handle these things, notably the implicit pointer creation features.
That's not something I'd really want to tackle just now.

As far as TeX goes, I feel rather more confident that we can tweak it to
do that right thing without major surgery.

    Thoughts?

The big question is whether just a one-line @part is sufficient, or if
the full @partpage is worth dealing with.

Come to think, I guess any extraneous material desired could be added as
@tex or @iftex before the following @node/@chapter.  That makes me think
the one-line @part is enough.  It'll be confusing that it isn't
associated with nodes, but such is life.

?

Thanks,
Karl