Re: Prettifying Info node (variable pitch font)

[Yuan Fu]

> On Jun 19, 2020, at 2:33 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:36:10 -0400
>> 
>> Here is my take on prettifying Info node. Apart from looks prettier, I think 
>> it makes Info node more legible.
>> 
>> 1. I added variable pitch font to Info.
>> 2. My prettification also takes advantage of word wrapping, so the Info node 
>> looks good in any buffer width.
>> 3. Indent and everything work right.
> 
> Thanks, but I don't see how this can be done correctly in principle.
> Texinfo has several types of what it calls "environments", each one of
> which determines whether the produced text needs to be indented or
> not, filled or not, centered or not, etc.  In the Info format produced
> by 'makeinfo' that information is lost.  While you may be able to
> guess the kind of "environment" in some situations, I don't see how
> you could do that everywhere and with 100% accuracy.  Without that,
> the result will sometimes be incorrect.  E.g., what happens with
> results of @quotation or @verbatim or @display or @format or
> @flushright or @caption or...?  Check out the Texinfo manual for what
> effect each one of these produces in the Info manual.  It's possible
> that our own manuals don't use any of these features, so you didn't
> see them.  But we could use them at some future time, and other
> manuals do.
> 

Indeed, I used some ad-hoc rules to “parse” the info file. Then the right thing 
for me is to make this a package for whoever is interested and can stand 
incorrectness here and there.

> The way to display the Info documentation as a Web browser would is to
> work with HTML (or similar) format, not with Info format.  I believe
> there's work under way as part of the Texinfo package to add such
> capabilities to Texinfo.  When that is done, we will need to adapt our
> Info reader to the resulting format, or maybe write a new reader from
> scratch.


That would be very nice. 

Yuan