Re: Typos in the manual

[Neil Jerram]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Neil,

Hi Ralf,

I pushed some more changes based on your input.  Below has just a few
specific notes.

> * Neil Jerram wrote on Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 01:49:43AM CET:
>> 
>> Will @var always generate appropriate markup for making it clear that
>> GUILE_EFFECTIVE_VERSION isn't meant literally?  I think that is what the
>> < and > intend to indicate.
>
> Well, @var is the intended way to denote metasyntactic variables.
> In info output, it capitalizes, in PDF output it uses a different font
> (or small caps IIRC).  See 'info texinfo var'.  It might sometimes be
> a bit hard to always read them correctly in info output.  I'm not sure
> how info could be improved though.

Yes, I'm convinced now and so have applied this.

>> Why is \sqrt2 better than \sqrt{2} ?
>
> No idea, that was pure consistency at work: you already use \sqrt2
> elsewhere.  Doesn't matter really.

I went for \sqrt{2} everywhere - I think that avoids anyone (who doesn't
immediately know the fine detail of TeX's lexer) wondering whether \sqrt2
might be a special TeX token.

>> > - In the Autoconf section, several macros are added to the function
>> >   index.  They come from doc/ref/autoconf{,-macros}.texi (one being
>> >   generated from meta/guile.m4.  The macros are:
>> >     PKG_CHECK_MODULES
>> >     GUILE_PROGS
>> >     GUILE_FLAGS
>> >     GUILE_SITE_DIR
>> >     GUILE_CHECK_RETVAL
>> >     GUILE_MODULE_CHECK
>> >     GUILE_MODULE_AVAILABLE
>> >     GUILE_MODULE_REQUIRED
>> >     GUILE_MODULE_EXPORTS
>> >     GUILE_MODULE_REQUIRED_EXPORT
>> >
>> >   The simplest way to fix this
>> 
>> Fix what?
>> 
>> > would be to adjust indices.texi to
>> >   document that Autoconf macros and variables are also listed in this
>> >   index.  Karl tells me that one should have less indices anyway for the
>> >   autotools manuals (ideally just one), so this would seem like a step
>> >   in the right direction.
>> 
>> Sorry, I'm not following here at all.
>
> Well.  If you look at the Procedure Index of the manual, you will find
> entries for the above Autoconf macros in there.  The Procedure Index has
> the following intro text:
>
>   This is an alphabetical list of all the procedures and macros in Guile.
>
>      When looking for a particular procedure, please look under its Scheme
>   name as well as under its C name.  The C name can be constructed from
>   the Scheme names by a simple transformation described in the section
>   *Note API Overview::.
>
> In other words, no mention of "Autoconf macros", and I wouldn't expect
> to find them there, among all the Scheme and C symbols.  Now, you can
> either fix the text to match the contents, or change the extractor to
> not emit @deffn's for the Autoconf macro in doc/ref/autoconf-macros.texi
> so that they don't end being listed in the Procedure Index.
>
> Is that clearer now?

Yes, thanks; done as you and Karl recommend.

      Neil