D.9 Direct Formatting of Info files

In general, there is no need to edit or process Info files. Most of the content of Info file is plain text, but the tag tables require computing offsets for nodes and indirect files (see Tag Files and Split Files), which is impractical. The Texinfo processors output well-formatted Info from Texinfo input. Also, lot of information from the Texinfo source is lost in the Info file. The Texinfo source is therefore more suitable to analyse a manual, be it for error reporting, for statistics, or to set up translations.

Still, especially with manually written Info files, there are some situations where it may be interesting to process Info files directly, in particular to compute Info files node offsets and to compute split Info files file offsets. Two Emacs commands do that. Info-tagify adds a tag table for a nonsplit file lacking one. This function is also useful for Info file validation (see Finding Badly Referenced Nodes). It is also possible to split a nonsplit Info file with Info-split.