On 10 October 2015 at 08:06, Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote: >> Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2015 21:51:31 GMT >> From: Karl Berry <[email protected]> >> >> Wrt the general point: as far as I can imagine, the (vast) majority of >> manuals indexing \ sequences would be for C-style \n, \r, etc. As a >> reader, I would certainly expect those to be indexed under \.
You have a point there: I was going with what was in the Texinfo manual, but looking at some other manuals, there are several where two-character sequences beginning with backslash are indexed frequently. I'd be inclined to index those ignoring the backslash as well, but less so than for a full word following the backslash. For the Texinfo manual, doing it this way saved me adding sort keys in several places, and I'd assumed this would reduce labour for other manuals as well, but clearly that's not the case. I think an option would be the best, off by default for backslash. The others were < and -. < for HTML-style tags, - for command-line options. The < case is rare enough that it's probably better to leave that off by default as well. Many manuals index command-line options and I think that making - ignored by default for sorting would be the better choice. It won't be possible to ignore arbitrary characters (easily, anyway) because ignoring a character relies on it being active in the Texinfo format. >> >> Wrt \mathopsup: since \ is a special character in Texinfo, I actually >> found it reasonable and useful to have all the \sequences used in >> Texinfo end up together in the index. That way people can easily see >> all those special \sequences. There is no other easy way. >> >> Of course, in regular TeX manuals, it is better to ignore the \ on >> control sequence names, just as it is better to index Texinfo command >> names without the @. But there are relatively few Texinfo manuals >> relating to TeX. > > So I guess we should have an option to enable/disable this feature, > since "one size fits all" clearly doesn't work here? >
