Hi Gavin.
I can certainly appreciate all the work you have put in, and I am happy
to hear from others on the subject. But for myself, I'm afraid I simply
do not like the results. (I don't like them in Emacs either, not that
anyone asked me.) However, since I personally never use the standalone
reader for "real" work, if there is a consensus that they are
improvements, I won't stand in the way. (In which case, it would be nice
if there was at least an option for the current "plain" output.)
Regarding the header line, for me that is crucial "where am I"
information. Heck, even Emacs doesn't get rid of that :). (Indeed, it
is spread over two lines now.)
Regarding menus and cross-references, having the * and *note, etc.,
indicate to the reader that it is a menu or cross-reference is perfectly
comprehensible IMHO. I personally find this approach vastly preferable
to the bold/italic/underlining/whatever, as Emacs is promulgating now
(by default; thankfully Eli and Juri have helped me turn off all these
"advances").
In general, what you see as a defect ("notation for a computer"), I see
as a positive ("plain and simple text"), i.e., for me it's not broken
and doesn't need to be fixed. I guess I'm just too much of a dinosaur.
best,
karl
P.S. Regarding your other work, on UTF-8 vs. ISO, it still seems to me
that in principle this should be addressed at the terminal level,
instead of every single cmdline application having to deal with the same
problem. Not that I have any expectation of that happening
