Re: [help-texinfo] Octave fails to build with texinfo.tex changes to @sortas

[Mike Miller]

On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 12:37:38 +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 03:55:30PM -0700, Mike Miller wrote:
> > I've found the problem through trial and error elimination of index
> > entries. The root cause is the following index entry
> > 
> >     @opindex . @ @ @ 
> > 
> > This is apparently trying to create an index entry ".   ", with trailing
> > spaces for some reason. This is hard to read and maintain anyway, so I
> > will work within Octave to come up with a better index entry.
> 
> This is very strange and I don't know why anybody would want to do this. 
> I will look at it to see if it can be fixed.  Perhaps it is something to 
> do with the trimming of spaces around the index entry.

Thanks for your reply. Turns out the reason for adding the spaces was
because the printed manual rendered the index entry like this

    ".......................................... 101"

where it was hard to distinguish the "." operator from the "."
separators. You can see this on page 1001 of an old version of the
manual (https://octave.org/doc/octave-4.2.2.pdf). The spaces were
intended to make that more readable, see for example page 1069 in a more
recent version (https://octave.org/doc/octave-5.1.0.pdf).

However, it's more trouble than it's worth, so I've already changed the
index entry to include some text after the operator instead
(https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/1dbe839bedcb). So this is
working now from my side.

Thanks again,

-- 
mike