* Karl Berry wrote on Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 01:39:30AM CEST: > As I wrote Ralf separately ... this > omitting-common-prefix-for-better-sorting thing is pretty much the valid > reason I've ever been able to see for having separate indexes. > Otherwise, it's just a pain for users to have a bunch of different > places to look, assuming knowledge may not have. Again, especially for > the printed manual.
I understand that having separate indexes may not be useful in a printed version of the manual, but I certainly find them helpful in online PDF, HTML, and info output, because just searching for a name in the index (which I do with the search function of the file viewer, not manually) already provides me with information about the type of the indexed thing. YMMV. > (I looked just now, and the Autoconf manual is even > worse than Emacs in this regard -- nine indexes! Yikes!) Yes, the Autoconf manual makes use of the prefix thing. > I could imagine fancy/obscure new features to specify the common prefix, > and then info --index could apply the prefix, but ... anyway ... That would make collapsing the indexes in Autoconf easier, but I'd still probably prefer to do it just for DVI/PS output. Thanks, Ralf
