Re: [help-texinfo] category system for texinfo

[Karl Berry]

Hi Robert,

(Sorry for the delayed reply.)

    or failing that how much texinfo can help me do this.

It's a good question.  From your description, it occurs to me that this
seems close to an "index of categories".  So I wonder if Texinfo's index
commands can help a bit.  I'm not entirely sure, but I surmise you're
thinking of something like

    @deffn MyCat myfn
    @mycategory{Cat2}
    @mycategory{Cat3}
    myfn does blah.
    @end deffn

And then there will be an automatically generated node for each category:

    @node Cat2
    @section Cat2

    @ref{myfn}.

Is that anywhere close to right?

I wonder about making @mycategory do an automatic index of its arg, as
in
@defindex ct
...
@macro mycategory {arg}
@ctindex \arg\
@end macro

(Off the top of my head, not claiming this code is usable as-is.)

I don't think @printindex will look quite right for the output (but
maybe it's close?), but you could then at least use the raw/sorted index
files as fodder for awk/perl/whatever to create the category nodes.

I think you'll be better off with a @mycategory that takes one arg,
instead of trying to parse multiple args.

Not sure if any of this is useful, but it's what came to mind.  Happy to
talk about it more if that'd be fruitful.  I'm psyched that Texinfo is
used for something as significant as Maxima!

Best,
Karl