When should we put @key inside @kbd?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I have brought in the Texinfo maintainer, and Karl Berry, a TeX wizard
who knows Texinfo well too, I hope they can help us decide what is
right to do here.

The question that presented itself was, when we want to talk about one
keyboard key, should we put @kbd around @key?

The practical difference is that @kbd causes the word inside @key
to appear slanted (in the oblique font).

That question raises a broader question.
Under what circumstances do we want the @key name to be slanted,
and under what circumstances do we want it not to be slanted?
We need to work out a style rule for this.  Once we have the style
rule, we can decide how to implement it.  

@key is always for keyboard input.  Are there two kinds of cases of
mentioning keyboard keys that we would want to distinguish by slanted
vs non-slanted?

Or is it better if @key always looks the same?

Maybe we should change the definition of @key so that
it uses the same font regardless of whether it is inside @kbd.

If we do that, we have two choices of how to do it: always use the
slanted font, or always use the normal typewriter font.  Which is better?


A historical note that might help us decide.
There was a time when @kbd used the non-slanted font.
So it fit naturally with @key.  When we changed @kbd
to use the slanted font, I think we created this confusion.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.