texinfo: Conventions

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1.9 General Syntactic Conventions
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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 (Note: @noindent).

   * Texinfo supports the usual quotation marks used in English and in
     other languages; see Note: Inserting Quotation Marks.

   * 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, do not use tab characters in a Texinfo file!
     (Except perhaps 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 have a different
     appearance in the output.

     To avoid this problem, Texinfo mode in GNU Emacs inserts 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.