Re: Unadorned cross-references

[Augusto Stoffel]

On Mon, 31 May 2021 at 20:17, Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:

> This question comes up again and again and the following was added to
> the manual to address this. I hope it explains the issue.

Well, yes, it _explains_ the issue.  But why not solve the issue?

> Yes, but how do I get a plain link, with no extra markup?
>
>      You can't.  Info is a plain text format that is displayed mostly
>      as-is in the viewers, and without the '*note' text there would be
>      nothing to mark text as a link.

Of course some markup is needed to indicate a link.  The problem is not
the markup, but rather the grammatical assumption that every internal
cross-reference starts with "see".  But there's no intrinsic need to
make a grammatical assumption about the context of a link.  None of the
so-called lightweight markup languages make such assumption!

So I'll flesh out my suggestion a bit further.  Define a new macro, say
@yref, which works as follows:

      The template is like this:

      @yref{node-name, online-label}.

      For example,

      @yref{Electrical Effects, Lightning}.

      produces:

      *Note Lightning: Electrical Effects#

      in Info and

          Lightning

      in a printed manual, where the node name is printed, and

         <a href="somefile.html#electrical-effect">Lightning</a>

      in HTML.

Emacs can be easily adapted to handle this new case in Info files:

  1. "*note title: place." will remain being rendered as "see title.",
     where the word "title" has the link face and a button to "place".
  1. "*note title: place," will remain being rendered as "see title,",
     where the word "title" has the link face and a button to "place".
  2. "*note title: place#" will be rendered as "title", where the word
     title has the link face and a button to "place".  No "see" before,
     and no punctuation after.

Wouldn't that work?