Subject: Re: bug#2975: texinfo-master-menu and emacs.texi

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:28:37 +0200

> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 14:54:55 -0600
> From: "Roland Winkler" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> On Thu Dec 8 2011 Št pán N mec wrote:
> > So, given that makeinfo can add the info itself when needed, is there
> > really ever any need for listing the node pointers explicitly at all?
> 
> If Karl or whoever could answer this question with a clear "no, these
> node pointers are never needed" (say, for recent versions of makeinfo
> and other tools for formatting info pages) this could make things
> much easier!

I tried to explain that already, in my original mail: they are not
needed if you structure your Texinfo source according to the rules
described in "(texinfo)makeinfo Pointer Creation".

Most manuals should have no problems being structured like that (the
Emacs User Manual and Emacs Lisp Manual are actually structured
according to those rules), but some specialized uses of Texinfo cannot
be limited to tree-like structure, or don't want to use sectioning
commands (@chapter, @section, etc.) or menus, or want to order the
nodes in some special way that defeats the automatic generation of
node pointers.  For these, you must explicitly have the Next, Prev, Up
pointers in Texinfo.