[pdftex] Possible bug in pdftexinfo.tex

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Charlie Zender wrote:

> 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 is out of date.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.

My belief is that you should just use the texinfo.tex from the texinfo 4.0
distribution (or later), and use texi2dvi --pdf.  That works fine for me
on Unix: it does not work on Windows but calling the components directly
does.

It is the concept of pdftexinfo.tex that is out of date, I believe.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595