Re: Unadorned cross-references

[Augusto Stoffel]

On Tue,  1 Jun 2021 at 15:23, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com>
>> Date: Mon, 31 May 2021 22:38:30 +0200
>> Cc: Texinfo <bug-texinfo@gnu.org>
>> 
>> 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?
>
> If we are after an Emacs-only solution, then how about teaching Emacs
> to detect the uses of "*note" that don't need to be converted to
> "see", but can instead be converted to nothing?  It's just a matter of
> the grammar and syntax of the surrounding text, right?

This would be a pretty hard NLP problem.  It's probably doable nowadays
with some fancy machine learning...

>
> As an alternative, how about customizing Info-hide-note-references to
> the value 'hide', perhaps it gives better results than the default t?

This still shows the period after the link.  In any case, it misses the
point.

The point is that Texinfo is a perfectly capable system, but you can't
convert documents made in other markup languages to Texinfo (and
therefore Info) format.  Consequently, you can't use the Emacs Info
browser, which is a nice and perfectly capable tool, to read
documentation not written in Texinfo.

Moreover, the above is not due to any fundamental issue, but rather to
the very prosaic problem that Texinfo is missing a plain cross-reference
markup.  One could declare that Texinfo is "done", or obsolete, but that
seems a waste.