The preamble starts at the beginning of the Texinfo file and continues
until the first directly output material. It typically includes the
file header (see Texinfo File Header), the @copying block
specifying the document permissions (see @copying: Declare Copying Permissions) and the
@titlepage specification (see Title and Copyright Pages).
The preamble may contain commands that affect document formatting
as a whole but which do not produce output, or do not produce output
straight away, such as @settitle (see @settitle: Set the Document Title),
@documentlanguage, (see @documentlanguage ll[_cc]: Set the Document Language),
commands setting the headings, controlling indentation or hyphenation,
or the table of contents (see Generating a Table of Contents).
Any text that starts a paragraph, @-commands that are formatted
as quotations, tables, lists and so on, and @node (see Nodes)
and chapter structuring commands (see Chapter Structuring) end the
preamble.
The concept of the preamble is significant for LaTeX output, as the
\begin{document} line is output at the end of the preamble.
In plaintext, the preamble is simply output as usual at the beginning of the
document; for example, a @contents in the preamble is output as
the table of contents (see Generating a Table of Contents).
There is not much special treatment of the preamble for HTML and Info
output either. However, some settings current at the very end of
the preamble may be used for the document as a whole, regardless of
what follows. This may apply to commands specifying the indentation,
or the language (see @documentlanguage ll[_cc]: Set the Document Language).
For example, for the following document, the HTML and Info copying
comments are formatted with @documentlanguage set to ‘pt’,
as it is the last @documentlanguage before the end of the
preamble.
\input texinfo
@documentlanguage fr
@copying
The copying information @error{} some text
@end copying
@documentlanguage pt
Text ending the preamble
@documentlanguage de
@node Top