10 Printing Nodes

In general, we recommend that you use TeX to format the document and print sections of it, by running tex on the Texinfo source file. However, you may wish to print out the contents of a node as a quick reference document for later use, or if you don’t have TeX installed. Info provides you with a command for doing this.

M-x print-node

Pipe the contents of the current node through the command in the environment variable INFO_PRINT_COMMAND. If the variable does not exist, the node is simply piped to lpr (on DOS/Windows, the default is to print the node to the local printer device, PRN).

The value of INFO_PRINT_COMMAND may begin with the ‘>’ character, as in ‘>/dev/printer’, in which case Info treats the rest as the name of a file or a device. Instead of piping to a command, Info opens the file, writes the node contents, and closes the file, under the assumption that text written to that file will be printed by the underlying OS.