D.6.1 Running texi2any/makeinfo Within Emacs ¶

The texi2any program provides better error messages than either of the Emacs formatting commands. We recommend it. The texi2any program is independent of Emacs.

You can run texi2any (or makeinfo) in GNU Emacs Texinfo mode by using either the makeinfo-region or the makeinfo-buffer commands. In Texinfo mode, the commands are bound to C-c C-m C-r and C-c C-m C-b by default.

C-c C-m C-r

M-x makeinfo-region

Format the current region for Info.

C-c C-m C-b

M-x makeinfo-buffer

Format the current buffer for Info.

When you invoke makeinfo-region the output goes to a temporary buffer. When you invoke makeinfo-buffer output goes to the file set with @setfilename (see @setfilename: Set the Output File Name).

The Emacs makeinfo-region and makeinfo-buffer commands run the texi2any program in a temporary shell buffer. If texi2any finds any errors, Emacs displays the error messages in the temporary buffer.

You can parse the error messages by typing C-x ` (next-error). This causes Emacs to go to and position the cursor on the line in the Texinfo source that texi2any thinks caused the error. See Running make or Compilers Generally in The GNU Emacs Manual, for more information about using the next-error command.

In addition, you can kill the shell in which the texi2any command is running or make the shell buffer display its most recent output.

C-c C-m C-k ¶

M-x makeinfo-kill-job

Kill the current running texi2any (or makeinfo) job (from makeinfo-region or makeinfo-buffer).

C-c C-m C-l ¶

M-x makeinfo-recenter-output-buffer

Redisplay the texi2any shell buffer to display its most recent output.

(Note that the parallel commands for killing and recentering a TeX job are C-c C-t C-k and C-c C-t C-l. See Formatting and Printing in Texinfo Mode.)

You can specify options for texi2any by setting the makeinfo-options variable with either the M-x customize or the M-x set-variable command, or by setting the variable in your .emacs initialization file.

For example, you could write the following in your .emacs file:

(setq makeinfo-options
     "--paragraph-indent=0 --no-split
      --fill-column=70 --verbose")

For more information, see
Easy Customization Interface in The GNU Emacs Manual,
Examining and Setting Variables in The GNU Emacs Manual,
Init File in The GNU Emacs Manual, and
texi2any Options.