[pdftex] Possible bug in pdftexinfo.tex

[Charlie Zender]

Hi,

The latest GNU texinfo.tex file (\texinfoversion{2000-12-11.07})
from ftp.gnu.org works fine with a long TeXinfo file I have.
The texinfo.tex file that accompanies recent pdftex distributions,
however, appears to have some problems. Namely, the file texinfo.tex
in pdftex distribution pdftex-20010126, which has a late 1999 datestamp

\def\texinfoversion{1999-08-19.17} % updated for pdfTeX

appears to not support some texinfo 4.0 features. I believe the feature
that the pdf texinfo.tex is failing on is handling index entries which
contain entries of the format

@acronym{FOO} plain text.

The index files (e.g., doc.cps) that texi2dvi generates from a *.texi
file appear to cause texindex to barf when the pdftexinfo.tex file is
used. Of course, I do not think that texi2dvi is calling pdftex, I
think it is calling plain tex. But I, and others, I believe,
have  in front of $TEXMFDIR/tex in our $TEXINPUTS
variable so that pdftexinfo.tex is used instead of texinfo.tex.
In any case, it appears that blithely calling texi2dvi with
$TEXMFDIR/pdftex first in one's path will result in failure on
perfectly legal *.texi files. My guess is that pdftexinfo.tex
is out of date. Or perhaps I am doing something wrong and if so
would appreciate knowing what. I thought the idea was that 
pdftexinfo.tex should work fine when called by regular tex, but
should do special extra features when called by pdftex.

Thanks,
Charlie
-- 
Charlie Zender zender at uci.edu (949) 824-2987/FAX-3256, Department of
Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine CA 92697-3100