Re: Texinfo reputation

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:
> My impression based on debian-user mailing list messages is that
> people avoid info manuals due to inconvenience of the standalone
> reader. They have some workarounds for cases when length of a man page
> is excessively high for comfortable reading. An example is PDF
> generated from BASH man page despite BASH has the manual in the
> texinfo format.

I used to be annoyed by the standalone reader, but with

info --usage <package>

it’s actually pretty good. It nowadays also gives a useful answer when
looking for a non-existing manual:

    info NOTEXISTING
    info: No menu item 'NOTEXISTING' in node '(dir)Top'

That was my main gripe with it, and I guess that most old timers don’t
know about that change.

You even get very fast full-text search through the manuals.

What I just found a bit lacking is tool support: pygments does not have
highlighting for texinfo (latex export of texinfo sources), export to
HTML doesn’t look great by default.

And: info --usage git does not give the invocation page — because that
node is missing in the manual. That’s not a problem of texinfo, but an
indication that something may be missing:

Is there a linter for texinfo that remarks such problems?

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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