Re: Fwd: REVIEW REQUEST - user manual generation

[Gavin Smith]

On 3 May 2016 at 10:13, Vincent Belaïche <address@hidden> wrote:
> - it seems that \input already does some catcode setup, the only
>   characters for which I needed some escaping stuff are %, ~ and ^.

When running texi2dvi with Texinfo input, it's the catcodes of plain
TeX that are used. For LaTeX, I don't  know, either the catcodes of
LaTeX, or LaTeX may override \input to do catcode setup.

> - I replaced spaces in filename by \space. This does not work with
>   MikTeX, but maybe some day there is some tex implementation able to
>   handle this properly --- there is no good reason why this should be more
>   difficult than handling %. My opinion is anyway that the use of some
>   double quote delimiters explicitely passed to tex is not a good idea.

Spaces in filenames are difficult. I found that a space would
terminate the filename even when it wasn't a space character with
catcode 10 (space). So my idea to change the catcode of space before
generating a token list didn't work: for reading a file called "a
b.texi", I wanted to do

tex 
'\def\\{}\def\makespaceletter{\catcode32=11}\expandafter\makespaceletter\expandafter\toks\expandafter0\expandafter{\expandafter\input\\a
b.texi\relax}\the\toks0\relax'

But this doesn't work. It looks for a file called "a".

I had a look at the text in "TeX the Program" (by Donald Knuth) to see
if there was any info about this. Part 29 "Filenames", Section 511
says:

"The following procedures don't allow spaces to be part of file names;
but some users seem to like names that are spaced-out.
System-dependent changes to allow such things should probably be made
with reluctance, and only when an entire file name that includes
spaces is "quoted" somehow."

So yes, spaces in filenames is "system-dependent", i.e. may differ
between Web2C, MiKTeX etc.

FWIW the following does work with Web2C:

tex '\input "a b.texi"'