Suggestions for texi2any parsing

[Frederico Muñoz]

Hi,

I'm using Texinfo for my personal blog, using texi2any to do the heavy
lifting (check https://interlaye.red/Texiblog.html for the idea behind
it and a link to the repository).

I've noticed some changes and improvements in texi2any since 7.0.3,
which "forced" me to fix some things on my side (the @menu format used
to be more lenient in accepting an initial space, now it's stricter),
but more importantly allowed me to take advantage of new features (the
new syntax highlighting support is great).

That led me to this email, since perhaps some of the steps I do (through
pre- and post-processing) could possibly be enhancements for the future.

** Automatic creation of "extended" menus.

I am not using `FORMAT_MENU="sectiontoc"` because it doesn't allow me to
add a descriptive sentence at the end. I use this in several places:

1. The main page has a menu under "Home" in which each section gets a
small description. I maintain this manually, pointing to files.

2. The "Posts" page is an automatically created posts.texi file (using
M4) that includes  something like:

```
@menu
*  My latest article.              2024-02-24
*  Another one about this.         2024-02-10
@end menu

@include posts/latest.texi
@include posts/another.texi

```

... which adds the date after the title (fundamental for my purpose). I
get the date from the @date field (a macro) in my individual posts.

This works, but perhaps it would be possible to combine the automatic
menu generation (from FORMAT_MENU="sectiontoc") with the "extended"
format, thus eliminating this step? Perhaps by adding an additional
option with what should be the content of the description field?

== Adding a "Top" navigation entry

For a web page I find it useful to be able to easily go to the
homepage. I'm manually changing the HTML to add a "Top" navigation entry
that points to the index page. I experimented with several options but
didn't get this effect. Is something like this possible, and if not,
would it be a useful addition?

== Support for image URLs

I use @image for the images, and this requires a local file. I can work
around this either by having the file, or doing some pre-processing, but
it would be easier to support image URLs. I understand that this is
something that is not simple since it wouldn't work in non HTML modes,
so I get why it is like it is.


Neither of these are really needed, and I can keep doing my own changes
around it, but perhaps one of them is useful for someone else. I also
completely recognise that using Texinfo for a personal blog is not the
main use-case of it and as such these enhancements are a bit fringe.

Best regards, and thank you for all the work in Texinfo and texi2any,

Frederico