Re: address@hidden: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex]

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Drew Adams" <address@hidden>
> Cc: <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 21:01:52 -0700
> 
> That's really too bad, if it's the case. Keywords are important things to
> put in an index (not to mention the fact that some languages to be
> documented might use colons in special ways). If this is really not
> feasible, then users are reduced to using search in Info to find a keyword
> such as :type, :display, or :enable - pretty primitive

Actually, I don't think it's so bad as you make it sound -- in the
case of Emacs Lisp (as opposed to, for example, C++), because I really
doubt that many people would use `:foo' instead of `foo' to look for
the keywords.  After all, the colon is similar to the quote ' in Emacs
Lisp, and you aren't going to lobby for indexing 'keymap or
'wrong-number-of-arguments, would you?

> (but still far better
> than visiting the many "type", "display", "enable" etc. index entries).

Please suggest how to qualify the index entries for the keywords that
use such common words, so that they would clearly stand out in the
list popped by TAB-completion.

> Is there no way to escape a colon somehow, so that Info does not interpret
> it?

Sadly, no.

> I haven't used TeX/LaTeX/Texinfo for 20 years, but my memory of LaTeX and
> Tex, at least, is of something very powerful and flexible.

TeX and LaTeX are powerful, but Texinfo is implemented by a very
simple one-pass processor and a bunch of TeX macros, so it doesn't
have a power that is anywhere near that.

> Suggestion: If a user enters a colon at the `Info-index' prompt, print a
> message saying 1) that the colon is being ignored, and 2) you can, as an
> alternative, use search (`s' or `C-s') to search the manual for a term that
> contains a colon.

I think index search is so much more powerful that `s', even with the
colon problem, that it's not a good idea to suggest `s'.