Re: terminal escapes in Info files?

[Karl Berry]

    > if we want to add font markup to info fmt, let's not use something as
    > ugly as terminal escape squences.  please design something clean!

Since Info is inherently limited to what can be displayed on a terminal,
it seems like ANSI escape sequences are as reasonable specification of
the capabilities as anything else?  Easy to implement, too.  Admittedly
the ESC [ blah blah sequences are ugly, though.

    How about using what Enriched-Text mode uses in Emacs?  See
    etc/enriched.doc in the Emacs distro.

That is indeed a lot cleaner (also quite a bit more verbose :).  Thanks
for mentioning it, I wasn't aware of it.

It seems using this would imply a new non-backward-compatible output
format, though, since every literal < needs to be escaped in enriched
format, and existing info readers don't know how to do that.

Using the ugly terminal escape sequences, on the other hand, is
backward-compatible because I'm sure that no real document has literal
terminal escape sequences (Texinfo hasn't had @ctrl for years ...).

Hmm.  As always, it seems there is no easy answer.

Thanks,
k