1.7 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 `@}'.
• Separate paragraphs with one or more blank lines. Currently Texinfo only recognizes newline characters as end of line, not the CRLF sequence used on some systems; so a blank line means exactly two consecutive newlines. Sometimes blank lines are useful or convenient in other cases as well; you can use the @noindent to inhibit paragraph indentation if required (see @noindent).
• Use doubled single-quote characters to begin and end quotations: ``...''. 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 "...".

  You may occasionally need to produce two consecutive single quotes; for example, in documenting a computer language such as Maxima where '' is a valid command. You can do this with the input '@w{}'; the empty @w command stops the combination into the double-quote characters.

  The left quote character (`, ASCII code 96) used in Texinfo is a grave accent in ANSI and ISO character set standards. We use it as a quote character because that is how TeX is set up, by default. We hope to eventually support the various quotation characters in Unicode.

• Use three hyphens in a row, `---', to produce a long dash—like this (called an em dash), used for punctuation in sentences. Use two hyphens, `--', to produce a medium dash (called an en dash), used primarily for numeric ranges, as in “June 25–26”. Use a single hyphen, `-', to produce a standard hyphen used in compound words. For display on the screen, Info reduces three hyphens to two and two hyphens to one (not transitively!). Of course, any number of hyphens in the source remain as they are in literal contexts, such as @code and @example.
• Caution: Last and most important, 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 in the source. Furthermore, makeinfo does nothing special with tabs, and thus a tab character in your input file will usually appear differently in the output.

  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, or use the unexpand command from the shell.