Re: 3 Offers

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 07:07:09PM -0400, Randall Sawyer wrote:
> Offer 1): Command and Variable Filters: Not all commands are employed by
> info, tex, docbook, xml, html or plaintext.
> I am willing to continue to learn which of each of the texinfo commands and
> configurable variables influence each of the output formats - and then to
> edit the existing texinfo documentation to reflect this. I certainly would
> have found this useful to know already at this point.

The manual does state in the documentation for some commands how those 
commands are supported in various output formats.  If there are gaps 
they could certainly be filled if it was useful for the reader of the 
manual to know about.

> 
> Offer 2): Syntax Validator: Provide a texinfo file syntax validator to
> assist authors of texinfo files.
> At this point, I have have written a simple validator of texinfo files.
> Running either 'makeinfo' or my validator on 120 initial (beginning with
> "\input texinfo") files, I have discovered a handful of syntactical errors.
> Among these are a single line containing "@end address@hidden", a block
> beginning with "@code" and ending with "@end code" ('@code' is not a block
> command), use of '@verbatim{|...|}' when the author meant '@verb{|...|}',
> and incomplete '@defmac ...' and '@defmacx ...' lines continued by a single
> '@' line continuation. Upon reaching these line continuations, 'makinfo'
> collects them as errors and fails.

Doesn't makeinfo already detect these errors?

The '@' line continuation is supported and documentated in the manual 
for the definition commands only.

> Offer 3): Accents: Update all possible accented glyphs to reflect current
> unicode.
> The documentation of texinfo does not indicate which arguments produce
> defined results for accent commands. Some - but not all possible - accented
> entites are defined in 'texinfo.dtd'. After extracting all texinfo commands
> into a spreadsheet, as I moved the various blocks of cells around and made
> notes, I used a desktop unicode browser to locate well over 200 accented
> glyphs which are modified ascii characters or ligatures or standalone
> accents. I am not sure how many of these are represented by TeX commands. I
> am willing to find out.

We can add support for more accented characters if it is possible to do 
so. There is a limit to how many characters can be supported in TeX as 
they may not be supported with the fonts that come with TeX.