Re: @smallbook and friends

[Karl Berry]

            The documentation does not make it clear that @smallfoo doesn't
    do anything unless @smallbook has been called.

The documentation was intentionally vague on that point, because I
didn't want to promise that behavior :).

In fact, I recently changed texinfo.tex so that @small... gives smaller
fonts even in non-small formats, since a number of users had requested it.

I would guess that texinfo.tex is not in gcc yet.