Re: @strong{NOTE}

[Karl Berry]

Hi Bruno,

    It is annoying that a tool wants to
    prescribe to the documentation author 

Yes it is, but of course this was built into the Info format from the
beginning and isn't going to change at this late date.

    prescribe to use @quotation for something that is not a quotation.

Well, that was my other workaround.  Personally I don't think it's
possible to adhere to 100% logical markup, so using @quotation
"incorrectly" is not horrible to me.

  1) Change the "info" program to recognize only "*Note" and not "*NOTE"
     as a hyperlink,

I'm extremely reluctant to break backwards compatibility.

  2) Change the "makeinfo" program to process @strong{NOTE:} just like it
     would process @strong{FOOBAR:}?

I don't understand.  What does it do differently, besides give the
warning?  You mean not give the warning?  For myself, I never liked that
warning anyway -- so what if info thinks something is a cross-reference
which isn't, it doesn't hurt anything that I can see.  And authors
always seem to want to use "Note".  As I recall, I put in the warning
because people requested it; now lots of people don't like it.  Sigh.

    I am now temporarily using extra spaces:    @strong{ NOTE: }
    Do you agree that this is not optimal?

I agree it's not optimal, but it actually doesn't seem bad to me.  The
"optimal" solution I can think of would have been for Info format to be
designed differently, but we obviously can't change that now.  I have a
vague theory to implement an alternative syntax to get around this (and
problems with : etc. in node names, which is much worse than this), but
who knows when or if it will happen.


One more personal opinion which you probably don't care about: virtually
everything I have seen prefaced with @strong{Note} in manuals reads
better if the "Note" is simply omitted.  "Note" is semantically
redundant.

Best,
Karl