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General Syntactic Conventions

This section describes the general conventions used in all Texinfo documents.

• All printable ASCII characters except @, { and } can appear in a Texinfo file and stand for themselves. @ is the escape character which introduces commands, while { and } are used to surround arguments to certain commands. To put one of these special characters into the document, put an @ character in front of it, like this: @@, @{, and @}.
• It is customary in TeX to use doubled single-quote characters to begin and end quotations: ``...''. This convention should be followed in Texinfo files. TeX converts two single quotes to left- and right-hand doubled quotation marks, and Info converts doubled single-quote characters to ASCII double-quotes: ``...'' becomes "...".
• Use three hyphens in a row, ---, for a dash--like this. In TeX, a single or double hyphen produces a printed dash that is shorter than the usual typeset dash. Info reduces three hyphens to two for display on the screen.
• To prevent a paragraph from being indented in the printed manual, put the command @noindent on a line by itself before the paragraph.
• If you mark off a region of the Texinfo file with the @iftex and @end iftex commands, that region will appear only in the printed copy; in that region, you can use certain commands borrowed from plain TeX that you cannot use in Info. Conversely, text surrounded by @ifnottex and @end ifnottex will appear in all output formats except TeX.

  Each of the other output formats (html, info, plaintext) have an analogous pair of commands. See Conditionals.

Caution: Do not use tab characters in a Texinfo file (except in verbatim modes)! TeX uses variable-width fonts, which means that it is impractical at best to define a tab to work in all circumstances. Consequently, TeX treats tabs like single spaces, and that is not what they look like. Furthermore, makeinfo does nothing special with tabs, and thus a tab character in your input file may appear differently in the output, for example, in indented text.

To avoid this problem, Texinfo mode causes GNU Emacs to insert multiple spaces when you press the <TAB> key.

Also, you can run untabify in Emacs to convert tabs in a region to multiple spaces.