Re: [help-texinfo] proof-of-concept documentation category system

[Robert Dodier]

Hi Karl, you wrote:

> Oh, I guess you want to have the categories included in the actual
> output, too, e.g.,
> http://maxima.sourceforge.net/misc/tmp-categories-html/tmp-target_36.html#genindex
> That can't be done with an index, although adding a feature to indexes
> to make it possible seems fairly feasible.  I'm not sure, but I don't
> think hardwiring knowledge of "Categories" as a special case is the best
> general approach.

I'm not convinced the concept of a category should be subsumed
by that of an index. Maybe, maybe not. In any event it's still not
clear how Maxima categories ought to work, so before getting into an
implementation we'll go around on prototypes a couple more times.

Aside from that, texi2html is fairly complex & instead of hacking it
maybe it would be better to write a small stand-alone program.
Again, maybe, maybe not.

>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jarmusch
>
> The interesting thing about the wikipedia categories is that they cut
> across articles, of course.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that.

> The equivalent feature in Texinfo is @dircategory, although it is
> definitely underdeveloped and underused.

Isn't @dircategory something rather different? At least that's
what I concluded from reading the documentation.

> In particular, forcing the dir
> file to be a single node is highly problematic if there were going to be
> thousands of Texinfo categories.  It's already problematic to list every
> libc function, which is, after all, part of the idea of Info (replace
> man).  However, changing this is unfortunately not easy.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at here.

Thanks for your comments,
Robert Dodier