Re: [help-texinfo] Hyperlinks in Texinfo

[tomas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 11:09:46PM +0100, Andreas Falkenhahn wrote:
> >> On 25.11.2011 at 22:50 address@hidden wrote:

[...]

> >Read about the @xref family of directives in the Texinfo manual.
> 
> I did but AFAICS this will always generate a "See..." prefix for the
> reference. Of course, there's @ref but this will also generate some
> additional output like Section XX, Page YY, which I don't want [...]


> Click @definelink{this link,mynode1234} to jump to mynode1234.
> 
> This should generate the following text:
> 
> Click this link to jump to mynode1234.

There is an interesting point which has been made implicitly by Karl and
Eli, which I'd like to make more explicit.

Texinfo was designed with the idea that the author writes one text, and
then the system targets different media. This has mayn strengths, but
many limitations.

So Andreas: if you *know* you are targeting just hypermedia (HTML, PDF),
then the text "Click ... to jump" may be appropriate; for print it
isn't (and -- who knows: there might be hypermedia out there where the
expression "to click" makes no sense). Thus it would be better to let
Texinfo choose this text when rendering to hypermedia, instead of
hardwiring it to the document.

Still, Texinfo is a tool, and there should be ways to let the user take
control as in

  "yes, I know: you are rendering to PDF. But the reader will be
   clicking on links, believe me"

Or:

  "On hypermedia, I'd like to wrap the phrase 'Click ... to jump'
   around links"

Sorry for the lecture

Regards
- -- tomás
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFO0eT4Bcgs9XrR2kYRAhjxAJ9W3MCOGEBQP99R2cSR2lmAbRyhBQCePazu
IBojFe7ldWbTqzBShw7+pCY=
=2bfQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----