1.6 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 `@}'.

* 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.


