Re: Further issues with CSS for Texinfo manuals

On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 10:03:40PM +0100, Thérèse Godefroy wrote:
> Le 10/01/2026 à 00:26, Gavin Smith a écrit :
> > * Vertical spacing in indices is excessive.  See for example
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Index.html#Index_fn_letter-A.
> > There is no need for the extra whitespace between index entries.
> > It means fewer entries are visible on the screen at once.
> > 
> 
> That's an important consideration, but we also need to think of
> smartphone users. The clickable area must be wide enough that they don't
> push on 2 links at the same time. The entries should also be well
> separated when lines wrap.

> [...]

> I reduced the vertical padding from .4em to .2em, and line-height from
> 1.4em (or 1.5em in gnulib/manual.css) to 1.3em in all tables.

This is an improvement, thanks.

> In some indices, entries are very far from the corresponding sections.
> As cells don't have horizontal borders [1], it's easy to associate an
> entry with a section that corresponds to its neighbor. To minimize this
> possibility, I added a light-tan background to the rows upon hovering.

Looks good, although it doesn't work perfectly.

It does not work with the CSS classes for multi-level indices in the
development version:

<tr><td class="printindex-index-entry"><a href="Inserting-Accents.html#index-Accents_002c-inserting">Accents, inserting</a></td><td class="printindex-index-section"><a href="Inserting-Accents.html">Inserting Accents</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="printindex-index-entry"><code class="code">accesskey</code></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td class="printindex-index-subentry-level-1"><a href="HTML-Customization-Variables-List.html#index-accesskey-customization-variable-for">customization variable for</a></td><td class="printindex-index-section"><a href="HTML-Customization-Variables-List.html">HTML Customization Variables List</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="printindex-index-subentry-level-1"><a href="Writing-a-Menu.html#index-accesskey-in-HTML-output-of-menus">in HTML output of menus</a></td><td class="printindex-index-section"><a href="Writing-a-Menu.html">Writing a Menu</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="printindex-index-subentry-level-1"><a href="Texinfo-Document-Structure.html#index-accesskey-in-HTML-output-of-nodes">in HTML output of nodes</a></td><td class="printindex-index-section"><a href="Texinfo-Document-Structure.html">Texinfo Document Structure</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="printindex-index-entry"><a href="_0040unnumbered-_0040appendix.html#index-_003cacknowledgements_003e-DocBook-tag"><code class="code">&lt;acknowledgements&gt;</code> DocBook tag</a></td><td class="printindex-index-section"><a href="_0040unnumbered-_0040appendix.html"><code class="code">@unnumbered @appendix</code></a></td></tr>

The "printindex-index-entry" rows are highlighted but not the
"printindex-index-subentry-level-1" rows.  "printindex-index-subentry-level-2"
is also possible.  From style.css:

  /* For indices. Make the rows stand out on hover to better visualize which
     section corresponds to which entry. */
  table[class*="printindex"] tr:hover td[class*="index-entry"],
  table[class*="printindex"] tr:hover td[class*="index-section"] {
     background:#f9f6ed;
  }

It would probably be accommodated by adding in addition:

  table[class*="printindex"] tr:hover td[class*="index-subentry"],

Less importantly, at
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Index.html#Index_fn_letter-A.,
you can see there is a small section that is not highlighted when you
hover over each index entry.  This is due to a small cell <td>&nbsp;</td>.
You may decide this is a very minor problem and not worth trying to fix.
(It might not be possible to find those cells with CSS as they don't
have a class set.)

That page was generated with Texinfo 7.0.3.  The small cell is not
present with output from 7.2 (I haven't tracked down exactly when
the change was made.)




> > * No underlining is needed on <abbr> even if the "title" attribute
> > is present, as the expansion appears afterwards in brackets.  There's no
> > point in prompting the user to hover their mouse over the abbreviation
> > to get an expansion as a tooltip when the expansion is right there
> > after the abbreviation.  E.g. in "Comput. J. (Computer Journal)",
> > the "Comput. J." text would be underlined and hovering over it would
> > display a "Computer Journal" tooltip.
> > 
> 
> I removed the styling of <acronym title="...">, but couldn't test the
> result because I didn't find any examples of this markup in texinfo
> manuals that use gnu.org/style.css.
> 

It seems to work fine, thanks.