spielwiese. (Posts about texi2dvi.)https://spielwiese.fontein.de/tag/texi2dvi.atom2019-11-17T10:45:43ZfelixNikolaa very annoying bug in texi2dvi/texi2pdf.https://spielwiese.fontein.de/2012/11/17/a-very-annoying-bug-in-texi2dvitexi2pdf/2012-11-17T17:59:18+01:002012-11-17T17:59:18+01:00felix<p>today i discovered why sometimes, some of my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX">latex</a> output contains tildes (~) in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format">dvi</a>/pdf version. usually, if you use a tilde in a tex file, it is interpreted as a non-breakable space (except in special circumstances, such as verbatim environments or in <code>\url{…}</code>). but thanks to a <a href="http://www.google.com/?q=debian+Bug%23495577">“bugfix”</a> to <a href="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texi2dvi">texi2dvi/texi2pdf</a>, which is a wonderful tool as it runs (pdf)latex often enough together with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX">bibtex</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeIndex">makeindex</a> etc., tildes appearing in tex files are now shown as tildes in the dvi/pdf output. which is absolutely inacceptable behaviour.<br>
it seems that this already was reported (see <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=534458">here</a>, <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2009-05/msg00005.html">here</a>, <a href="http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40569/avoid-non-breaking-space-characters-printing-as-tildes-when-using-texi2dvi-in-r">here</a>), but it is still around. i don’t really know what to think of this – is nobody responsible for working on texi2dvi/texi2pdf? or did people stop using it as it is broken?<br>
anyway, i fixed my local installed version (<code>/usr/bin/texi2dvi</code>) by chaning the line <code>catcode_special=true</code> to <code>catcode_special=false</code>. a more sophisticated version would be nice, which only changes <code>catcode_special</code> for tex files (and not for texinfo files), but i don’t have time for that now.</p>