Re: My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[Dave Pawson]

On 22/09/2007, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> Nothing wrong with your motivation. And, yes, trying to provide a useful 
> index (in whatever form) usually requires some human effort and judgment - 
> automatic indexing is somewhat limited in practice.

Yes, we all view things differently I guess.

>
> Eli, too, was trying to be helpful - and he was helpful, no?
Yes. I learned from this thread.



>
> You could also create a page on EmacsWiki to collect such keywords: 
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SiteMap. Then, either Eli or some other 
> Emacs developer might occasionally check what has been added there, or you or 
> someone else could occasionally post here any new entries that are collected 
> there. Emacs Wiki is an incredible collaborative resource, and it's low-key, 
> dumb-easy to use.

another one. I'd never seen that.
(I'm beginning to feel as Tims RTFM might be more applicabe than usual
for me :-)




>
> As frequenters of this list and emacs-devel@gnu.org will attest, Eli and I 
> don't always agree ;-), but followup to improve the manual indexes is one 
> area (there are others) where I think he does a terrific job. The point here 
> is that your proposal to collect unsuccessful user search attempts, synonyms 
> and the like can be plugged into the existing mechanisms such as manual 
> indexes, and Eli is quite helpful in this regard.

I've no issue with feeding back to Eli or the wiki.
Maybe like Steve, I find XML more flexible when I want to re-index, so
I'm looking
at creating an XML version. Currently fighting the ??? (I think it's
texi, but unsure)
source from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html to generate
docbook. That's a good start for me.
The html output is SGML, not XHTML, so that's harder, and the --docbook seems
to produce an empty file, using
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/~checkout~/texinfo/texinfo/util/gendocs.sh

Does it work with the downloaded files? emacs emacs[1..8]
It seems to cough and look for a .texi extension?


Any suggestions how that might work?
I'm trying
 $ ./gendocs.sh --docbook -o tmp emacs "Emacs"
on the gunzipped emacs.info.tar.gz from the same page.



>
> Wrt difficulty navigating Emacs Info pages: try Icicles - 
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles. Command `icicle-Info-index' 
> (`i' in Info) lets you easily navigate index entries, and command 
> `icicle-Info-goto-node' (`g' in Info) lets you easily browse Info nodes. They 
> let you type a substring or other regexp and zip around all index terms or 
> node names that match, in any order. See 
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Info_Enhancements.

<prejudice/> I really don't like | find hard to use, the info style
stuff. I guess I've
been spoiled with searchable, navigable html over the years I've been
using emacs?
I've offered to work on a docbook version with a better index, to Eli, offlist.



>
> And (no relation with Icicles) with Emacs 22, you can use incremental search 
> throughout a manual. If something has no index entry, try repeated `C-s'. 
> Then let help-gnu-emacs know if you think what you were looking for should be 
> added to the index.

There's enough in this thread to start a hunt the thimble thread on the wiki!
help-gnu-emacs, is that a feedback idea? <sigh/> Does that mean a default
emacs Linux installation can get connected without me doing anything?



>
> Wrt "indexable html pages derived from indexed xml": It's not a bad idea, and 
> it has been discussed before by Emacs development contributors. Info is 
> currently not XML or HTML based, and a move in such a direction is not 
> trivial. But all ideas and implementation and design efforts are appreciated 
> - emacs-devel@gnu.org.


Honestly, I'd be far happier working in docbook xml!
Now just need to get the shell script working :-)


regards


-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk