Re: makeinfo-info.el - use Info-mode with makeinfo-buffer

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 4 Dec 2002, Miles Bader wrote:

> Ediff has some functionality like this -- it `refines' thunks it gets
> from diff by doing its own diff algorithm at the character level, and
> can indicate via faces which parts of thunks are important.

IIRC, Ediff does this at the _word_ level, not at the character level.  It 
breaks each line in the hunk into words, then constructs a temporary file 
where each word is on its own line.  It then submits two such temp files 
to `diff' and interprets the results.

That is, given the simple hunk

 ! foo bar baz more stuff
 ---
 ! foo another baz less stuff

Ediff will produce two files like this:

  foo
  bar
  baz
  more
  stuff

and

  foo
  another
  baz
  less
  stuff

and run `diff' on them.  The results will show that the second and the 
fourth word changed, but the rest didn't.

The only problem with this solution is that breaking a line into a list 
of words is non-trivial due to m17n considerations, especially if the 
buffer mixes several character sets.  IIRC, for that reason, Ediff uses 
some ad-hoc method instead of relying on syntax categories of characters.