Tim Conrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> My problem with X<> it is that it's disruptive to the readability of the
> text if it's embedded and used too much, as it might well be for
> indexing. I was trying to navigate a way around that problem. I confess
> I haven't worked out how to deal with fine grained references.
The other problem with X<> is that its semantics are disputed. Be aware
that most existing translators do *not* output the text inside X<> as part
of the translated output; it's considered a zero-width index entry, and
Pod::Man for example does odd out-of-band things with it. It's been
proposed to change how it works, and I have no problem with that, but
someone needs to write an RFC to hammer out the exact semantics that
people want. (There are also disagreements between translators on what
index entries are auto-generated and how to include multiple entries in a
single X<>.)
> I'm not a pod-head, so let me ask a question: Do directives like '=
> item' have (or create) a "context" as far as the parser is concerned?
> That is, a region of the document they "control"?
Kind of, but not formally. Right now, =item controls the next paragraph
only insofar as is necessary to do the formatting the translator needs to
do, which means not at all in Pod::Man but to some degree in Pod::Text.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
