Re: Unadorned cross-references

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 12:03:04PM +0200, Augusto Stoffel wrote:
> On Thu,  3 Jun 2021 at 10:45, Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 06:18:57PM +0200, Augusto Stoffel wrote:
> >> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > I may be missing something, but it seems to me that @ref{} is more or
> > less the plain cross-reference markup command in Texinfo (in addition to
> > @url{}).
> 
> This is a good point.  However, @ref and @xref generate the same output
> in the info files, which is problematic.
> 
> Thus, the example in the @ref entry of the manual, namely
> 
>         For more information, @pxref{This}, and @ref{That}.
> 
> renders as follows in Emacs:
> 
>         For more information, see This, and see That.
> 
> while the author's intention was to say
> 
>         For more information, see This, and That.
> 
> Can we agree this is a problem?

I agree, but this is an issue with the Info format, not with Texinfo,
nor with the converters, or the Info viewers, such as Emacs.  When
converting to a format that has less expressivity some information is
lost.

> > Info is a different issue, the cross-references are described formally in
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Cross-Reference.html
> > and indeed, there is no plain cross-reference.
> 
> I hope the above example convinces people that this is an undesirable
> limitation, even if Texinfo is "done" and will not be fixed.

Texinfo is not "done", it still evolves.  The whole issue is about Info
and not Texinfo.  Info is much more complicated to evolve than Texinfo,
as the older readers need to be able to view newly generated Info files,
and also because it is a very simple format which has no provision for
any type of markup.  I think that it is the reason why nobody is
enthousiastic about changing Info and most peaople consider that Info
is "done" and that new development would better be targetted towards
enhancing other formats (HTML) output and viewers rather than modifying
Info.

-- 
Pat