Re: [help-texinfo] No index in PDF manual

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 11:22:03PM +0000, Mohammad Akhlaghi wrote:
> >Running "texi2pdf --verbose gnuastro.texi" might give more information
> >about why texindex is not being run or not being run properly.
> 
> The raw command didn't work because of all those imported files, so I
> manually added `--verbose' in the Makefile where it calls `texi2pdf', and
> ran `make pdf'. It is indeed printing more information, you can see the
> result attached. Is it detecting the new format with the following message?
> 
> /usr/local/bin/texi2dvi: New xref files      = gnuastro.cp
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> Mohammad

It is the texi2dvi script that is not recognizing gnuastro.cp as an 
index file.  When the escape character changed to @ in index files, this change
was made in texi2dvi:

diff --git a/util/texi2dvi b/util/texi2dvi
index f906ed6..6a1391a 100755
--- a/util/texi2dvi
+++ b/util/texi2dvi
@@ -705,6 +705,8 @@ index_file_p ()
     latex:*:*:"\\indexentry{"*|latex:*:*:"\\indexentry {"*) echo $1;;
 
     texinfo:*:*:"\\entry{"*) echo $1;;
+    texinfo:*:*:"@entry{"*) echo $1;;
+    # @entry is output from newer versions of texinfo.tex
   esac
   return 0
 }


I'm not sure what the solution is here.  I had expected that it would be 
more likely that newer texi2dvi would be used with older texinfo.tex 
(due to the fact that texinfo.tex is not automatically installed by the
Makefile), but it appears that older texi2dvi is likely used with newer 
texinfo.tex.

If the newer version is coming from gnulib, one solution would be to ask 
the gnulib maintainers to keep an older version of texinfo.tex in 
their repository until the newer version of texi2dvi is more widespread.  
Maybe there is some way that texinfo.tex could be removed from 
build-aux, too.  (In Texinfo's own sources there is a version of 
texinfo.tex added automatically to build-aux, and this has been a source of 
confusion in the past, as the extra copy of the file is apparently 
unnecessary.)