Re: Page Numbers in @ref

[Christopher Dimech]

---------------------
Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 5:16 AM
> From: "Jacob Bachmeyer" <jcb62281@gmail.com>
> To: "Gavin Smith" <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Cc: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>, "help-texinfo gnu" 
> <help-texinfo@gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: Page Numbers in @ref
>
> Gavin Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 07:35:28PM +0100, Christopher Dimech wrote:
> >
> >> So currently, having page numbers with full page description remained.
> >> I fail to understand because the new possibilities are not difficult to
> >> do, yet refuse the change for those who require them.  In writing
> >> mathematical tables, the problem of limited space is real.  Have no
> >> doubt that the abbreviated possibility would not freak people out to
> >> something awful.
> >>
> >
> > Only options that many people are likely to use should be provided.
> > It's not clear that anybody but yourself would use an option for the
> > notation that you suggest.  I don't want to include lots of options
> > for highly-specific use cases: this is a burden for the future.
> > You are free to implement the formatting that you want yourself in
> > texinfo.tex (or ask somebody else to do it for you) and use your
> > patched version instead, but the official version has to take into
> > account all users and whether options are generally useful.
> >
>
> Christopher Dimech asked for a
> > construct that gives you the page number associated with a given
> > @ref, @xref, @pref or @anchor,
> which would be generally useful, and would allow him to make his
> abbreviated convention using a macro.  In fact, that is probably better
> than providing options on @ref at all:  documents needing an abbreviated
> form can define their own, while the use case of a non-hardcopy PDF with
> hyperlinks would be better met with a global option; switching between
> PDF-for-online-use and PDF-for-hardcopy should not require more effort
> than changing paper size.

I have suggested a plain ref, one that shows the ref with just the name
of a node or anchor, on an alternative text.  Then I can define a macro.

If I include the change in texinfo.tex as I am currently using, users
will have a problem. If they want to use an updated texinfo.tex
from the Texinfo Website, they also got to update that file with my
changes.

> -- Jacob
>