[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #52775] PDF user manual uses a backward apostrophe ` in code examples

[Rik]

Follow-up Comment #28, bug #52775 (project octave):

I do not want to give up the @sortas macro.  The new Graphics Properties Index
relies on it to put the Object Property link at the front of the table which
is important in my mind.

I'm not surprised that Texinfo 4.13, written in C, fails to work.  But I'm
surprised that versions > 5 can't be made to work.  They are written in Perl
and are under texi2any in /usr/bin with makeinfo being a symlink to that
file.

I looked at texi2any and I don't see any mention of TEXINPUTS so it is not
using that input variable to find texinfo.tex.  But it must find some version
of the macro file because sortas doesn't appear in all of /usr/bin, but it
does appear in the default location of
/usr/share/texmf/tex/texinfo/texinfo.tex.

This still seems like something that could be solved by getting texi2any to
find the correct macro file.  But if it can't then I think we just warn the
user and fail to build the manual.  I don't want inconsistency between
different users.

For perspective, this is really only a problem for developers and packagers. 
Everyone else will get a tarball with the pre-built documentation and they
aren't going to be messing around with texi files which would trigger a
requirement to rebuild.

Secondarily, lots of big packages have a docs-only distribution.  Octave could
move to that as well if it made things easier.  In that case it is quite clear
that when you pull octave-4.4.0-doc package you are getting just the
documentation for that specific version and there is no expectation that you
would build the documentation yourself.

Incidentally, I debugged things and it seems that texi2any verifies the syntax
of the texi file before passing it off for conversion.  The Perl modules that
do this are in /usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/*.pm.  So that is why an error is
generated with earlier versions because the Perl code hasn't been updated to
include the keyword sortas, even though the macro file itself has.

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