Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/12/05/07:35:49
On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, John M. Aldrich wrote:
> The biggest reason for this is
> that if a given term appears in the index, it will almost always also
> appear in the appropriate section of the FAQ, and thus a simple text
> search is more efficient in finding it than browsing the index.
Not necessarily. The index is produced from special entries, not from
the text of the sections, and so indices might well mention something
that doesn't appear in the text. When I write the entries which will go
into the index, I usually try to imagine what words/phrases would people
look for when they bump into a specific problem.
> thing I would like to see that would make the index more user-friendly
> is a search-by-term system similar to the one Windows Help uses. The
> user could type in a term and Info would display a list of all topics in
> the index matching the term. However, I don't know if the current
> version of Info supports this kind of functionality.
Does, too! Want to see that it does? Fire up Info, then type this:
Alt-x index-apropos RET cwsdpmi RET
Info will run for a while, and then display a menu of all the index
entries in *all* the Info files installed on your system which mention
cwsdpmi. Still think that Info is inferior to Windows Help?
Info also supports completion on menu items and cross-references. Since
the index is just a huge menu, you can have it auto-complete after typing
some characters and pressing TAB. For instance, if you type the
following:
m gcc TAB
You will see all the index entries which begin with `gcc'.
Once again: please use the FAQ indices more, and please tell me about
your experiences and anything that needs to be made better about the
indices.
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