On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 12:16:42AM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote: > I tried playing around with changing the default WORDS_IN_PAGE setting, > but I like suppressing the footer for very short nodes so I do not want > to set the default to 0. For example, a node like: > > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/html_node/Xref-Commands.html > > that just has a small amount of text, followed by a menu, looks "cleaner" > without the nav bar at the bottom.
I agree, I also think that it is better without footer for small nodes. > However, changing the default from 300 to 200 appears to have fairly > good results, in my testing - this still omits the bottom bar for very > short nodes while adding it in for some longer ones. We could change the default, I have never cheked precisely how the output changed, I am pretty sure that I carried over the value set in texi2html by Olaf Bachmann (probably) who implemented that feature around 2000 when I reimplemented. > It is complicated by the fact that the word count is done on the HTML output, > including all tags. This means the word count used can be much greater than > expected and it is not possible to calibrate the setting very precisely. Doing it on the raw text output would actually be straightforward, but my feeling is that the gain in usability is not worth the penalty in term of processing time, which is important. -- Pat
