Unadorned cross-references

[Augusto Stoffel]

I would like to suggest adding a command to Texinfo, as well as some
markup in the .info file format, to create unadorned cross-references,
that is, without the assumption that the cross reference fits in a
phrase like "see such and such".

Currently, it seems to be more or less impossible to create info
documentation from manuals that were not specifically written in
Texinfo, since other markup languages don't make a similar grammatical
assumption on internal hyperlinks.

For instance, I recently tried to do this with the Python manual
(converting rst files to texi with Sphinx, and then running makeinfo
to generate info files).  The result looks like this in Emacs:

    1.8.9.17 popen
    ..............

    The see os.popen(). and see subprocess.Popen(). functions
    now support see with. statements for auto-closing of the file
    descriptors.

The expected result would be "The os.open() and subprocess.Popen()
functions...", with hyperlinks on "os.open()" and "subprocess.Popen()".

The .info file itself looks like this:

    1.8.9.17 popen
    ..............

    The *note os.popen(): 3b5. and *note subprocess.Popen(): 3c5. functions
    now support *note with: 7b7. statements for auto-closing of the file
    descriptors.

I'm not very familiar with Texinfo, but one idea on how to implement
this suggestion on the .info side would be to extend the
    *note <topic>: <location><punctuation>
markup so that, say,
    *note <topic>: <location>#
signifies an unadorned internal link.

Finally, let me remark that the Python source code already includes a
Makefile target to build the documentation in info format, even though
their website doesn't offer this for download.  I can well imagine
that they would like to provide info manuals, and just don't do it
because they look a little wrong.