bug-texinfo
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Inconsistent space after raw regions


From: Gavin Smith
Subject: Re: Inconsistent space after raw regions
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2015 23:16:33 +0100

On 6 October 2015 at 22:48, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     unless there's an argument
>     for backwards compatibility.
>
> Obviously any change will break backwards compatibility and existing
> manuals that made their hacks to deal with the existing behavior will,
> most likely, fail.  But it seems like you've already changed newline
> behavior in other cases, namely macros, and if the end result is cleaner
> (i.e., can be the same for all formats), it is at least arguably worth
> it.  Seems like your choice to me.  I myself always avoided changing
> such behavior, but that may have ultimately been the worse choice.

The change I made for macros was for macro arguments. It was to match
'texi2dvi -E', to make it less necessary - it's a bad experience to
process a Texinfo file with "texi2dvi" and either get an error message
or bad output because you didn't pass the -E flag.

Some manuals do use hacks as you say. I was trying the gcc manual, and
with the latest texinfo.tex, there were many extra blank lines,
because of this:

@macro gccoptlist{body}
@smallexample
\body\
@end smallexample
@end macro
@c Makeinfo handles the above macro OK, TeX needs manual line breaks;
@c they get lost at some point in handling the macro.  But if @macro is
@c used here rather than @alias, it produces double line breaks.
@iftex
@macro gol
@end macro
@alias gol = *
@end iftex
@ifnottex
@macro gol
@end macro
@end ifnottex

In my download of the gcc manual sources, this was in
gcc/doc/include/gcc-common.texi. It's used like this:

@address@hidden @gol
-fgnu-runtime  -fnext-runtime @gol
-fno-nil-receivers @gol
address@hidden @gol
-fobjc-call-cxx-cdtors @gol
-fobjc-direct-dispatch @gol
-fobjc-exceptions @gol
-fobjc-gc @gol
-fobjc-nilcheck @gol
-fobjc-std=objc1 @gol
-fno-local-ivars @gol
address@hidden@r{|address@hidden|address@hidden|address@hidden @gol
-freplace-objc-classes @gol
-fzero-link @gol
-gen-decls @gol
-Wassign-intercept @gol
-Wno-protocol  -Wselector @gol
-Wstrict-selector-match @gol
-Wundeclared-selector}

So there's some pain here, but I think it's better to fix it and make
it consistent, otherwise everyone in the future writing other
documents will have exactly the same problem, and have to come up with
a similar work-around.

> As for existing manuals, as you know, lilypond and groff and calc are
> ones that persistently come up as making extensive use of macros,
> conditionals, and other "tricky" features.

I've tested the groff manual, haven't tested the lilypond manual
because I can't extract the documentation files from their build
system in a form I can compile, and didn't know about the calc manual.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]