On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 04:22:42PM +0200, Arsen Arsenović wrote:
> Per (texinfo) @anchor:
>
> You may wish to create cross-references to arbitrary positions in a
> document, not just to the beginning of nodes. The ‘@anchor’ command
> marks such a position in your document, called an “anchor”. Put an
> ‘@anchor’ command just before the position you wish to refer to. For
> example:
>
> ...
>
> When you delete or rename a node, it is usually a good idea to define
> an ‘@anchor’ with the old name. That way, any links to the old node,
> whether from other Texinfo manuals or general web pages, keep working.
>
> Indeed, we did just that. And placed @anchor above the new node into
> which old node contents were merged. But, the enchors ended up
> generating redirects to the wrong node!
They should be placed after the @node, not before it. We could update
the manual to state this.
The node only starts after the @node line, so an @anchor before @node is
in the previous node.
This is the simplest rule to implement, and I believe that changing
this would be difficult with texi2any, and practically impossible with
texinfo.tex.
I don't think there is any downside to placing the anchor after the @node line
rather than before.
> This is currently presenting a problem for GCC, where we merged a ton of
> nodes to make the manual more navigable, and set up redirects via
> anchors, but those redirects now go into an unrelated node.
>
> Note that a node may have arbitrarily many anchors (indeed, we have
> between two and six in various cases).
>
> I recall that a similar issue once happened with @*index commands, which
> lead to people developing a habit of placing @*index after whatever they
> were indexing (e.g. @item ... @*index) - I worry there may be similar
> code "in the wild" for @anchor, which "fixes" this issue in their .texi
> even though the actual issue is in texi2any, so it may be worth also
> adding a warning.
I remember the issue with @*index after/before @item was quite confusing,
but I believe it was fixed.
The index commands are not exactly the same as they occupy an entire line
in the input. The argument to @anchor{..} commands is brace-delimited.
>
> Thanks in advance, have a lovely day!
> --
> Arsen Arsenović
