Re: A question for package maintainers still using TexInfo < 5

[Julien Bect]

Le 23/04/2015 15:22, Olaf Till a écrit :
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 07:22:56AM -0400, Michael Goffioul wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Julien Bect <address@hidden
> > > wrote:
> > > Hello all,
> > >
> > > There is an ongoing discussion on this bug report:
> > > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?44899 which is related to the
> > > generate_html package.
> > >
> > > The point is: there is a hack in several functions of the package
> > > (html_help_tex, texi2html) which is supposed to deal with a bug in
> > > makeinfo. The bug is longer present in recent TexInfo releases, and the
> > > hack has some unpleasant side effects.
> Hello Michael,
>
> I'm no HTML expert, but wasn't the chief purpose of the hack to
> introduce '<p class="functionfile">' ? Does texinfo 5... do this
> without the hack (I haven't installed this version)? As I understand
> it, with that <p ...> tack one should be able to change the
> indentation specifically of the function definitions with CSS. The
> '&mdash' seems to have been rather removed 'by the way' by the hack
> and was used to find the location to insert the <p ...> tack.
>
> But if texinfo 5... does not introduce &mdash there, and neither
> introduces a suitable <p ...> tag (?) there, another indication for
> the place to put the <p class="functionfile">' tag would have to be
> found, may be before 'Function File:' ? But maybe this can wait until
> someone intends to apply a CSS which changes indentation there, don't
> know if such a CSS was ever applied for Octave Forge. There seem to be
> no strong preferences for a certain formatting at the starts of the
> function definitions, so maybe removing the hack without replacing it,
> and just using what the currently installed texinfo yields -- mdash or
> nothing(?) -- is allright ...
>
> Olaf

Thank you all for your answers. I think that I have enough information 
now to propose a fix. Here is what I propose to do:

1) I will rewrite the existing &mdash; hack (for TeckInfo < 5) using a 
more precise regexprep, to avoid replacing &mdash; entities not related 
to @deftypefn and @deftypefnx blocks.

2) Since the goal is to introduce a class="functionfile" attribute to 
control formating, I will propose a similar hack for TexInfo >= 5.

Then we will have <p class="functionfile"> </p> tags with TexInfo <5, 
and <dt class="functionfile"> </dt> tags with TexInfo >=5.

3) Extend the existing Octave-Forge CSS to define dt.functionfile 
(p.functionfile is already defined).

Would that be acceptable for everyone ?