Re: @value, macro and other expansion questions

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 09:52:40AM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
> Yes, makeinfo preserves spaces in the Info output.
> In normal text (as opposed to @example or whatever), though, it wouldn't
> be desirable for other output formats to do.  (And I don't think they
> do.  I mean, the multiple space characters may be in the output file,
> but they don't actually end up displaying multiple spaces in the output,
> and that is good.)

I think that this should be output format dependent. If this is a free
form format like xml, html, TeX, LaTeX, it should ignore spaces (but it
already does), but if it is a fixed form format, like info or plain
text, I think that it should try to keep the spaces as the writer wrote
them, when possible, but without making any such promise.

> Agreed.  I think it is even somewhat expected that spaces are ignored
> around Texinfo arguments in general.  Certainly something like
> 
> @include  foo.texi @c with two spaces
> 
> should not try to read a file named " foo.texi" (er, no quotes :), much less
> " foo.texi " or
> " foo.texi @c with two spaces".  It should just read "foo.texi".

Agreed. This is what all the implementation do, as far as I can tell and
it is what the user expect.

>     and the user can use @verb to have spaces. That would make @verb
>     another acceptable @-command in file names, with the same meaning
>     than in main ouput.
> 
> That sounds like a good approach in general.  Whether we can do it in
> texinfo.tex I don't know, but it doesn't matter -- if people want to use
> texinfo.tex, they need to restrict their filenames to normality anyway.
> But we don't need to restrict the language.

Ok.

And thanks, I think I got everything sorted out.

--
Pat