19.6.2 ‘#line’ and TeX

As mentioned, makeinfo recognizes the ‘#line’ directives described in the previous section. However, ‘texinfo.tex’ does not and cannot. Therefore, such a line will be incorrectly typeset verbatim if TeX sees it. The solution is to use makeinfo’s macro expansion options before running TeX. There are three approaches:

• If you run texi2dvi or its variants (see section Format with texi2dvi), you can pass ‘-E’ and texi2dvi will run makeinfo first to expand macros and eliminate ‘#line’.
• If you run makeinfo or its variants (see section texi2any: The Generic Translator for Texinfo), you can specify ‘--no-ifinfo --iftex -E somefile.out’, and then give ‘somefile.out’ to texi2dvi in a separate command.
• Or you can run ‘makeinfo --dvi --Xopt -E’. (Or ‘--pdf’ instead of ‘--dvi’.) makeinfo will then call texi2dvi -E.

One last caveat regarding use with TeX: since the #line directives are not recognized, the line numbers emitted by the @errormsg{} command (see section Conditional Commands), or by TeX itself, are the (incorrect) line numbers from the derived file which TeX is reading, rather than the preprocessor-specified line numbers. This is another example of why we recommend running makeinfo for the best diagnostics (see section makeinfo Advantages).

This document was generated on October 2, 2013 using texi2html 5.0.