Re: 3 Offers

[Randall Sawyer]

Thank you for your response.
> > Offer 1): Command and Variable Filters: Not all commands are employed by
> > info, tex, docbook, xml, html or plaintext.
> > I am willing to continue to learn which of each of the texinfo commands and
> > configurable variables influence each of the output formats - and then to
> > edit the existing texinfo documentation to reflect this. I certainly would
> > have found this useful to know already at this point.
> The manual does state in the documentation for some commands how those
> commands are supported in various output formats.  If there are gaps
> they could certainly be filled if it was useful for the reader of the
> manual to know about.
I am a visual learner - as opposed to linguistic.  It would help me if 
there were classification symbol(s) near each command in the 
documentation. In the interest of helping others like me, I will add 
these symbols to the existing documentation and share them via git to 
see if the team finds the edit worthy of adoption.
> > Offer 2): Syntax Validator: Provide a texinfo file syntax validator to
> > assist authors of texinfo files.
> > At this point, I have have written a simple validator of texinfo files.
> > Running either 'makeinfo' or my validator on 120 initial (beginning with
> > "\input texinfo") files, I have discovered a handful of syntactical errors.
> > Among these are a single line containing "@end address@hidden", a block
> > beginning with "@code" and ending with "@end code" ('@code' is not a block
> > command), use of '@verbatim{|...|}' when the author meant '@verb{|...|}',
> > and incomplete '@defmac ...' and '@defmacx ...' lines continued by a single
> > '@' line continuation. Upon reaching these line continuations, 'makinfo'
> > collects them as errors and fails.
> Doesn't makeinfo already detect these errors?
>
> The '@' line continuation is supported and documentated in the manual
> for the definition commands only.
Yes. Alright. I took a closer look. For the most part, the syntactic 
errors I found have been merely careless misuse of the markup. For 
example, a @address@hidden code block within a @verbatim block - which of 
course makeinfo copied without parsing. After re-reading the section on 
line continuation, I can see that the author had the end-of-line '@' 
inside of curly brackets.
> > Offer 3): Accents: Update all possible accented glyphs to reflect current
> > unicode.
> > The documentation of texinfo does not indicate which arguments produce
> > defined results for accent commands. Some - but not all possible - accented
> > entites are defined in 'texinfo.dtd'. After extracting all texinfo commands
> > into a spreadsheet, as I moved the various blocks of cells around and made
> > notes, I used a desktop unicode browser to locate well over 200 accented
> > glyphs which are modified ascii characters or ligatures or standalone
> > accents. I am not sure how many of these are represented by TeX commands. I
> > am willing to find out.
> We can add support for more accented characters if it is possible to do
> so. There is a limit to how many characters can be supported in TeX as
> they may not be supported with the fonts that come with TeX.
In that case, I volunteer to hunt for any - if any - neglected accent 
glyphs.