Re: problems with modern texinfo.tex

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Simon,

in short, I suggest that you apply the attached gnutls-texinfo.patch .

It not only works around the bug, it also makes your manual nicer. :-)


And now something for real TeXperts:

The problem is in fact caused by the command @insertcopying.

There was a change in the way @copying is handled in texinfo.tex.
In general, it's mroe robust now, but you stumbled over a bug.
A patch is attached to this mail, too: texinfo-20040818-activequot.patch

> ./version.texi:15: Missing control sequence inserted

The file and line info is wrong.  It's an interesting exmple how two
modern features, which were not present in original TeX don't work together.
If I run eTeX with good old TeX messages, I get:

! Missing control sequence inserted.
<inserted text>
                @inaccessible
<to be read again>
                   r
l.14 ... the section entitled address@hidden address@hidden @def r
                                                  address@hidden @char 34}GNU
@scanmacro ...ceisspace @scantokens address@hidden }
                                                  @endgroup
@insertcopying ...ent = 0pt @scanexp @copyingtext
                                                  @endgroup
l.51 @insertcopying

This means we are at line 14 of \scantokens inside line 51 of gnutls.texi.
eTeX probably opens a fictional input file for \scantokens, which has its
own line numbers but it doesn't have name (version.texi is the last real
file inputted, so the name is still there---what would happen if we
wouldn't input any file?).

Karl, are you able to report this to someone who would fix this bug?

Have nice day,
        Stepan Kasal

gnutls-texinfo.patch
Description: Text document

texinfo-20040818-activequot.patch
Description: Text document