Here are some questions that have been frequently asked on the project mailing lists and elsewhere.
Check that the Info manuals are installed. Not all GNU/Linux distributions install all the Info manuals by default. This is regrettable, as often the Info manual provides more information than the provided man page.
Manuals are rarely written in the Info format itself, but are
generated from Texinfo source by the texi2any program.
texi2any can generate HTML as well as Info from Texinfo
source. You can also access and download HTML manuals from the GNU
website (https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html). Additionally,
some GNU/Linux distributions provide packages for the installation
of HTML manuals.
Info still has some advantages over HTML for locally installed documentation. The Info browsers support index lookup and support for links between locally installed manuals in multiple locations. It’s important to have documentation installed locally on your machine rather than relying on the Internet; this makes accessing documentation more reliable, and ensures it matches installed versions of packages. It’s hoped that support for browsing locally installed Texinfo documentation in some form of HTML can be improved in the future.
info program when the Emacs Info reader is better?The Emacs Info reader can display images, and fully supports using
a mouse. There are not many differences among the Info readers
besides that. Command-line info can be configured
to change the default key bindings, as well as change the color
of cross-references and search results, and to enable mouse
scrolling support. You should not need to be experienced with
the Emacs editor to use info. (Some recommend another
program called pinfo, but this lacks in important
features like index lookup.)
Some prefer to be able to scroll through the entire manual at once (as
happens with man pages), rather than being limited to a single ‘node’
of content at once. Of course, there is no accounting for taste,
but a single, unstructured block of text becomes more awkward as a
manual becomes longer and more complicated. (However, if you really
want to, you can view an info manual all at once in the less
pager with ‘info foo | less’.)
By default, Emacs Info mode either changes the marker ‘*note’ for
cross-references to ‘see’, or hides it completely. Command-line
info does the same if hide-note-references is set.
Unfortunately, there is no way to do this reliably, as both the @pxref
and @ref commands in Texinfo output this marker in the Info
output, and the ‘see’ text is only appropriate for @pxref.
You can’t. Info is a plain text format that is displayed mostly as-is in the viewers, and without the ‘*note’ text there would be nothing to mark text as a link.
For output formats such as HTML, you can use the @link command
to produce a plain link. See @link: Plain, unadorned hyperlink. This does not produce
a working cross-reference in Info output or in a printed copy of the
manual, though.
This due to Emacs (or info with hide-note-references
set to ‘On’) hiding ‘*note’ strings, as mentioned above.
Any extension would be incompatible with existing Info-viewing programs. Extra markup added to Info files would be displayed to the user, making files ugly and unreadable.
When Texinfo files are processed into Info files, information about which Texinfo commands were used to markup text is lost. Moreover, it is not possible to reliably detect whether text can be reflowed (e.g. a paragraph of prose), or whether line breaks should be kept (e.g. a code sample, or poem).
Info’s core purpose is to display documentation on text terminals.
If you want more, you are recommended to use the HTML output from
texi2any instead.