Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 08:12:06 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: DJGPP-WORKERS Subject: Re: libc's index In-Reply-To: <200301011915.h01JF8H21395@speedy.ludd.luth.se> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Wed, 1 Jan 2003 ams AT ludd DOT luth DOT se wrote: > While looking in the infomanual of libc I'd like to be able to hit "i" > and the start of a function name and to be able to move around > quickly between functions. (Today I have to go to the alphabetical > index and scroll down or search for the function.) TAB completion works in menus as well, IIRC. Just press `m', the beginning of the function's name, and hit TAB. > Is that supposed to work and something broke? The libc manual was never indexed. It was assumed that, since the top-level menu is actually an alphabetic list very similar to an index, the index itself was unnecessary. IMHO, we do need an index (see below for some good reasons), but I never had time to sit down and add the index entries. If nothing else, the lack of an index fails some documentation commands in Emacs which need an index to glean the information. If someone wants to work on indexing the library reference, here are some random thoughts: - mkdoc.cc could add the trivial entries ("@findex foo" for each function `foo') automatically. - We need @vindex entries for all the environment variables mentioned in the library reference; these should be done manually (they aren't a lot). - @cindex entries for important concepts is where most of the manual labor is. But it's also where the significant add-on value of the indexing is, so it'd be a Good Thing if we had that. > Or what is necessary to enable this? As the example of the single index entry shows, it's enabled by default. But makeinfo won't generate an index without those @findex and @cindex entries, and you also need a @printindex directive at the right place. See the Texinfo manual for details.