On Sun, Mar 08, 2026 at 05:31:25PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > Hello, > > For the upcoming release, I would like to have a change made to the > Texinfo language by adding the possibility to add metadata in a generic > way. The different output formats would then use these metadata > in a format specific way. We already have metadata with @title, > @author... but I think that we should limit metadata associated > @-commands to basic metadata. > > I think that a block command for generic metadata would be better > because we do not know in advance about the type of information > corresponding to the metadata. Like: > > @metadata keywords > a, b, something > @end metadata > > @metadata abstract > This is about foo > > @quotation > This is in abstract. > @end quotation > @end metadata > > I think that we should document that it should be in @documentinfo, > although in implementations we could be more lenient and allow it > outside, in preamble. > > My feeling is that it could be ignored by TeX, LaTeX, plaintext > and Info output. For DocBook, at least some bookinfo elements > could be detected. For HTML, some specific values for meta could > be used: > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/meta/name > In EPUB there are several metadata that can or should be specified > that are described in the standard.
If such metadata information was transferred directly to the output formats you mention (DocBook, EPUB, HTML), it seems quite likely that the requirements of these formats would differ from each other. This would lead to the need to put such metadata information in format-specific blocks, like @ifdocbook or @ifhtml. I'd rather not encourage the use of such conditionals. I think it would be clearer if there are metadata that it would be useful to include then we could add new commands just for these that could be used inside @documentinfo.
