comments on texinfo.tex changes

[Werner LEMBERG]

[CVS 2003-09-22]

Please get

  ftp://ftp.ffii.org/pub/groff/devel/groff-current.tar.gz

and say

  ./configure
  cd doc
  make groff.pdf

The current snapshot of groff comes with texinfo.tex from version 4.6.

Then repeat the same with texinfo.tex version 2003-09-21.13 from the
texinfo CVS module.  Below I will call the created PDF files `old' and
`new', respectively.

[Note that groff.texinfo contains

  @tex
  \gdef\gobblefirst#1#2{#2}
  \gdef\putwordAppendix{\gobblefirst}
  @end tex

to suppress the ugly `Appendix' keyword in both the table of contents
and in headers -- since I have appendices A to K this looks horrible
otherwise. :-) But this is unrelated to what I'm discussing here.]


Here two comments on the current texinfo.tex appearance.

. The table of contents in `old' has far too much indentation (IMHO)
  for subsections, e.g.:

          4.3.5.9 An example multi-page table . . . . . . . . . . 46
          4.3.5.10 Footnotes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
    4.3.6 Page layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
          4.3.6.1 Headers and footers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
          4.3.6.2 Margins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

  In `new' we have this:

    4.3.5.9 An example multi-page table . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
    4.3.5.10 Footnotes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
    4.3.6 Page layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
    4.3.6.1 Headers and footers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
    4.3.6.2 Margins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

  This is ugly also since we get a ragged left border for the
  contents entries.  Cf. 4.3.5.10 followed by 4.3.6.

  In the new texinfo.tex there is the following comment:

    % We'd like to right-justify chapter numbers, but that looks
    % strange with appendix letters.  And right-justifying numbers and
    % left-justifying letters looks strange when there is less than 10
    % chapters.  Have to read the whole toc once to know how many
    % chapters there are before deciding ...

  Maybe it is time to do that right now :-)

  What about this layout:

        4.3.5.9  An example multi-page table  . . . . . . . . . . 46
        4.3.5.10 Footnotes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
    4.3.6 Page layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
        4.3.6.1  Headers and footers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
        4.3.6.2  Margins  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

  To implement that TeX has to scan the toc file once more to get the
  widest section numbers per sectioning level.

. Goto page 43 in `new'.  You will see

    4.3.5.6 Tab Stops

  and then a page break.  There were some efforts a few months ago to
  prevent this (with success IIRC), but apparently this uglyness is
  back...  There are *many* other places in the document where the
  same is happening.  I consider this as a real typographical bug.


    Werner