Re: [help-texinfo] glossary tips?

[Karl Berry]

Hi DJ,

    1. I want the terms to show up in the table of contents.  Why?

There is nothing right now to add arbitrary entries to the toc.  It
wouldn't be pretty, but I could probably come up with some incantation
you could use.  But this would make the printed/html toc's awfully long ...

       Because acroread and xpdf offer expanding TOCs, and being able to
       click on the term you're interested in right from the TOC would be

I could probably come up with a different incantation (even less pretty)
to just add an entry to the PDF outlines, without adding it to the
actual toc, if you want to go that way.

    2. I want to be able to link to a term's definition from other places
       in the document, much like sites like Wikipedia do - a use of a
       word is a link but not otherwise decorated, that links to the
       definition of that word.

The two choices are:
1) use @anchor and the normal @xref commands; then it'll work in Info,
but it won't be undecorated.  Probably too verbose for your purposes.
There's no way to have such an "undecorated" link in Info files.

2) do it for html only:
@html
<a name="foo"></a>
@end html
before each table item, and then

@ifhtml
@html
<a href="#foo">foo</a>
@end html
@end ifhtml
@ifnothtml
foo
@end ifnothtml

for each use.  Have to wrap it in a macro to be practical to use.  I
hope the newlines don't cause trouble.

Even this ugliness has the problem that if someone generates an html
file split in any way, the links would fail, since they wouldn't be in
the same file any more.


The other approach would be to make each term an unnumbered subsection,
then you'd get the toc stuff for free, but of course that'd make the
actual glossary quite verbose.

Sorry I don't have better news.  The only way I can see to really do
this right is design an entirely new @glossary feature ...

karl