Re: Fwd: REVIEW REQUEST - user manual generation

[Gavin Smith]

On 28 April 2016 at 09:30, Vincent Belaïche <address@hidden> wrote:
> - catcoding to letters all the tex special characters that are valid in
>   filename, that is to say: {}$#~ and space. I am using < > and | in
>   place of { } and space respectively as <>| are not valid in filenames
>   anyway. This does  not help either for the spaces in filename. However
>   this works for allowing {}$#~ in filenames, and this method is
>   superior to the current tricks for ~, as only the input filename is
>   affected rather than the whole document --- I would suggest to use
>   this, and make the -~ option obsolete and cleanup all the
>   normal_tilde + catcode_special variable stuff.
>
> To Karl: is there any reason why we need to affect the ~ catcode
> globally ? don't we need this only for the top level input filename ? Do
> you agree my suggestion to remove the current normale_tilde +
> catcode_special stuff.

Say you run "tex foo~bar.texi" where foo~bar.texi is a file whose name
has a tilde. For me, this gives an error:

This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.4)
! I can't find file `foo'.
<to be read again>
                   \penalty
~->\penalty
            address@hidden \
<*> foo~
        bar.texi
Please type another input file name:

But running it like this works:

 tex '\catcode126=12 \input foo~bar.texi'

That's what texi2dvi does. The foo~bar.texi file has a line in it
"\input texinfo" which loads texinfo.tex, and the catcode and active
definition of ~ are changed again. So the catcode given on the
command-line isn't lasting.