Proposed change to help text format

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-May-2005, Keith Goodman wrote:

| Current format followed by two proposed formats. (BTW, what does "see
| *Note Linear Algebra::." mean?)

In Info, this is a hyperlink, so you would be able to jump from
this tag to the "Linear Algebra" section of the manual.  Granted, it
doesn't help much in the standalone help text for a single function.

| ---------------------------------------------------------------------
| octave:1> help log
| log is a built-in mapper function
| 
|  -- Mapping Function:  log (X)
|      Compute the natural logarithm for each element of X.  To compute
|      the matrix logarithm, see *Note Linear Algebra::.
|    See also: log2, log10, logspace, and exp.
| 
| 
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------
| octave:2> help log
| log (X)
|    Compute the natural logarithm for each element of X.  To compute
|    the matrix logarithm, see *Note Linear Algebra::.
|   
|    See also: log2, log10, logspace, and exp.
| 
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------
| octave:3> help log
| log (X)
|    Compute the natural logarithm for each element of X.  To compute
|    the matrix logarithm, see *Note Linear Algebra::.
| 
|    log is a built-in mapper function.
|   
|    See also: log2, log10, logspace, and exp.

The format Octave uses is what is generated by makeinfo for the
@deftypefn macro.  If you want a different format, then you'll have to
change the way makeinfo works.  If you think you can get the changes
into the makeinfo distribution, or improve the implementation of
user-defined macros for Texinfo/makeinfo/etc., then OK, but I'd really
like to avoid having Octave depend on a non-standard version of those
tools.

Thanks,

jwe



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