Re: texinfo documentation? bug

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Mahlon,
>
> Thanks for the report, but ...
>
>     The documentation is ambiguous at best
>
> Which is intentional, here and in plenty of other cases.  I can't (don't
> want to) explicitly and completely define the result of every command in
> every context in the Texinfo manual.  That's not its purpose.
>
>     It shows an example where the @indent and
>     @noindent are used inside a @display (actually a @verbatim)
>
> The purpose of that example is to show how to avoid indenting a
> paragraph following @example (one kind of generic "display"), which
> otherwise happens by default.  That seems eminently practical to me, not
> nonsense.  (The nesting inside @address@hidden display may be odd, but
> it's conventional throughout the whole manual.)
>

I think there is a problem that the manual could be read to imply that
@noindent is meaningful when used within a @display, when in fact it
does nothing: there would be no first-line indent even without
@noindent. It would probably be better to take out the aside about the
example being within a @display. I don't think first-line indentation
is desirable in any of the block environments in Mahlon's test file
(@quotation is documented as not having it, @indented block is said to
be like @quotation, and @example, @display and @format operate
line-by-line with no filling).