Re: problem with groff.texi: @ref{} in PDF and HTML fomats

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 03:16:52AM +1000, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> [following up after nearly a year]
> 
> At 2020-05-27T23:37:29+1000, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Hi Gavin,
> > 
> > Please accept my apologies for the delay.  I kept wanting to produce a
> > reduced version of the groff Texinfo manual
> 
> I've finally managed to do this; I've cut down the groff Texinfo manual from
> over 18 thousand lines to about 130.  I'm attaching it and the PDF output.
> 
> Not knowing anything about Texinfo internals, and seeing what happens when I
> comment these lines out, I suspect the problem lies with the following.
> 
>     @c This suppresses the word `Appendix' in the appendix headers.
> 
>     @tex
>     \gdef\gobblefirst#1#2{#2}
>     \gdef\putwordAppendix{\gobblefirst}
>     @end tex
> 
> Evidently this technique is too crude.  Is there a better way to accomplish 
> this
> that will reliably work on all supported Texinfo output formats?


Yes, it is not surprising that this breaks somewhere.  \putwordAppendix
is used in several locations and it's hard to tell what the impact is of
giving it such a definition.

It's not easy to do what you want with the existing code.  The best I
came up with was

@tex
\global\let\Yappendixkeyword\relax
@end tex

but this leads to incorrect header lines, leading to the previous
chapter being used instead.

The code wasn't written to allow this kind of customization.  I can
see where the word "Appendix" is output in the chapter heading, in
\chapmacro, but there's no obvious user-accessible way to override
this.