menu reformatting

[Karl Berry]

Hi Patrice,

So, now that I've messed with so many node names in the manual, it's
time to reformat the menus so the descriptions are nicely aligned again
and everything is in sync.

1a) master menu in emacs: the texinfo-master-menu command in Emacs 24.2
works ok, but of course cannot take account of the extra characters
resulting from formatting in node names, to align the descriptions.

1b) master menu in tp: I tried running
  makeinfo -c TREE_TRANSFORMATIONS=regenerate_master_menu \
  -c PLAINTEXINFO=1 texinfo.txi -o /tmp/x
but the result was not what I expected; it seems to omit at least some
lower-level menus.  The first one missing is (ironically) the menu in
the "Updating Nodes and Menus" node.  Let me know if you need more
details.  (This isn't critical since the emacs command worked.)


2a) other menus in emacs: texinfo-all-menus-update says
  Updated level "1" menu following node: Top ...
and then hangs.  Oh well.

2b) other menus in tp: didn't see anything for this.  Am I missing it?


So, do you think it would be feasible to have a way for tp to regenerate
all menus, not just the master?  Also, I think it would be useful to be
able to specify a column number to try to align to.  If this is a pain,
it can just go on TODO and I'll do it by hand now.

A bigger but less important problem is the differences between
PLAINTEXINFO and the input.  For this particular job, the ideal thing
would be for the output to be the same as the input, i.e., without
expanding @value and the like.  Since the point is to re-insert the new
text into the original document.  However, since @value and macros and
so on are rarely if ever used in menus (it's not a problem in
texinfo.txi, anyway), there's no urgent need to worry about it.  Just a
TODO ...  (Didn't Bruno also want the unexpanded input for gettext?)

Thanks,
k