Re: Texinfo macros and m4

[Werner LEMBERG]

> There's a possibility to run the Texinfo input through "makeinfo -E"
> first,

groff needs this, BTW.

>    @macro arguments are separated by commas, but sometimes you need
>    to pass an argument that includes a literal comma.  You are
>    supposed to be able to do that by escaping the comma with a
>    backslash, but this raises problems when a macro calls another
>    macro.  Similar problems happen with using literal backslashes --
>    the Groff manual suffers from this problem.

And perhaps more importantly, GNU LilyPond.

>  . It is impossible to have a macro that defines another macro.

This is perhaps something which could be abandonded.  Or is there any
documentation which uses this?

>    Also, you cannot have "@macro" without the matching "@end macro",
>    or vice versa, inside a macro.

Again, this is something probably not really needed IMHO.

> These are what I remember, I'm sure Werner will come up with a few
> more annoyances.

:-) You might read the comments at the beginning of groff.texinfo.
It's probably not the cleanest texinfo code since the supporting stuff
has evolved over time.

groff needs a lot of `unbalanced' characters in commands which are
normally paired, e.g. `\(xx'.  There are some problems with @deffn
which is targeted quite narrow-mindedly to C and Lisp due to
historical circumstances.  In many cases, texinfo uses the wrong fonts
for such unbalanced characters.


    Werner