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Re: 3 dots vanish at end of filled line


From: Luc Teirlinck
Subject: Re: 3 dots vanish at end of filled line
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 19:57:03 -0500 (CDT)

Richard Stallman wrote:

       Why not get rid of such flawed heuristics and simply underline titles
       the way they are underlined in the .info files, as the standalone Info
       reader does?

   That is easy to say, but how would one do it?  How would Info
   recognize these titles if not by the following like which "underlines"
   them?

What I proposed in the above was to do what the standalone Info reader
does: to leave the titles underlined exactly the way they are in the
.info files and not to process them specially.  Hence, info.el would
not need to recognize titles.

If this would be unacceptable, then a less radical departure from the
current Emacs Info situation would be to recognize titles by the top
of the node pattern:

A line with an isolated literal Control-underscore, then a line
starting with: "File:", then a blank line, then a non-blank line (the
title) followed by a line of the same length consisting entirely of
one of the special characters.

That would only leave the @...heading series, where the title occurs
within the body of the note.  These are completely indistinguishable
to a computer program from certain non-title lines, although a human
reader usually will be easily able to distinguish from appearance and
context.

Leaving @...heading type titles unprocessed would avoid the bugs and
would not constitute a radical departure from the current Emacs style:
@...heading seems to be seldom used (the only example I know is
`(info)Advanced') and titles in the body of a node feel very different
from node titles anyway, so that displaying them differently makes sense.

In other words looking at the beginning of `(info)Advanced' (as it
appears in the standalone Info):

    2.1 Advanced Info Commands
    ==========================

    Here are some more Info commands that make it easier to move around.

    `g' goes to a node by name
    --------------------------

    If you know a node's name, you can go there by typing `g', the name,
    and <RET>.  Thus, `gTop<RET>' would go to the node called `Top' in this

The most radical proposal is to have Emacs display this exactly like
the standalone Info does, that is, literally as above.  The less
radical proposal is to keep displaying the node title
"2.1 Advanced Info Commands" as Emacs currently does (hide the
underlining and display the title bold and in a larger font), but
leave the subtitle:

`g' goes to a node by name
--------------------------

displayed exactly like that, without any processing.  Again, such
subtitles are relatively rare.  Both proposals would get rid of the
type of bugs we are discussing.

Sincerely,

Luc.




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