Re: wishlist: implicit anchor for @deffn etc

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 02:18:29PM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> An info format reader should ideally display such a link as plain NAME but 
> with some special
> color or style to mark it as a link, but otherwise not clutter up the 
> display.  If that is too
> difficult, one just output plain NAME without any decoration.

That is not possible as the info format needs *note or *Note to mark it as a 
link. It may be better to output plain NAME.

The same is probably true for printed output.

As you can see supporting these two output formats makes link-heavy text 
inappropriate.

I wonder if the text styling commands like @code should be combined into 
any new command so that @dref{NAME} would output NAME in a fixed-width
typeface. If @dfn were not already a Texinfo command, @dfn would be 
better than @dref as the fact that it is creating a cross-reference is 
more incidental. What comes to mind is @sym for symbol but there are 
likely other possibilities too. (However, this doesn't touch the issue 
of links to the definition from outside the manual.)

The final point is whether anyone would use this feature. You said it 
already exists in Sphinx; is it used a lot in manuals written in Sphinx? 
If so, that would be a good argument for adding the feature to Texinfo.