Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> writes: Hi Richard,
> I have brought in the Texinfo maintainer, and Karl Berry, a TeX wizard > who knows Texinfo well too, I hope they can help us decide what is > right to do here. > > The question that presented itself was, when we want to talk about one > keyboard key, should we put @kbd around @key? > > The practical difference is that @kbd causes the word inside @key > to appear slanted (in the oblique font). At least in HTML output. On other output formats, it might be formatted differently. > That question raises a broader question. > Under what circumstances do we want the @key name to be slanted, > and under what circumstances do we want it not to be slanted? > We need to work out a style rule for this. Once we have the style > rule, we can decide how to implement it. > > @key is always for keyboard input. Are there two kinds of cases of > mentioning keyboard keys that we would want to distinguish by slanted > vs non-slanted? I don't believe that @key is always for keyboard input. It is "the conventional name for a key on a keyboard" (quoted from the texinfo manual). That means, it is not bound to any input, typed on the keyboard first hand. In a broader sense, it is used also to describe such characters independent from keyboards, like this sentence from the Emacs manual: "@code{esc-map} is for characters that follow @key{ESC}." On the other hand, @kbd is used "for characters of input to be typed by users" (also quoted from the texinfo manual). That means in my understanding, when such a special key is typed, we shall mark it like @kbd{@key{TAB}}. > Or is it better if @key always looks the same? > > Maybe we should change the definition of @key so that > it uses the same font regardless of whether it is inside @kbd. > > If we do that, we have two choices of how to do it: always use the > slanted font, or always use the normal typewriter font. Which is better? I believe it makes much sense to indicate input to be typed. Whether it is slanted font or something else doesn't matter, but it shall be visible. Best regards, Michael.