[help-texinfo] category system for texinfo

[Robert Dodier]

Hello,

I am working on the Maxima (http://maxima.sf.net) reference
manual. I am thinking about establishing a category system
of the kind employed by Wikipedia, in which an article can
belong to multiple categories, which are indicated at the foot
of the page. Categories are indicated in the page source on
the article's page (not the category's page). The category
page has some summary text and a list of the articles in the
category; the list is generated by scanning the articles for
category tags.

What I'd like to do is make up a macro, which either takes
one argument and appears several times (once for each
category to which a @deffn or @defvr belongs) or takes
several arguments. In the article, @refs are generated
(maybe in a fancy box if html). A node is generated for
the category and @ref's to each @deffn / @defvr are
created.

I wonder whether this duplicates functionality already present
in texinfo, or if something similar has been created before,
or failing that how much texinfo can help me do this.
Certainly it is possible by making @mycategory expand
to nothing and using awk / perl / python et al to process
the category tags.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Robert Dodier