18.6 Formatting and Printing in Texinfo Mode

Texinfo mode provides several predefined key commands for TeX formatting and printing. These include commands for sorting indices, looking at the printer queue, killing the formatting job, and recentering the display of the buffer in which the operations occur.

C-c C-t C-b

M-x texinfo-tex-buffer

Run texi2dvi on the current buffer.

C-c C-t C-r

M-x texinfo-tex-region

Run TeX on the current region.

C-c C-t C-i

M-x texinfo-texindex

Sort the indices of a Texinfo file formatted with texinfo-tex-region.

C-c C-t C-p

M-x texinfo-tex-print

Print a DVI file that was made with texinfo-tex-region or texinfo-tex-buffer.

C-c C-t C-q

M-x tex-show-print-queue

Show the print queue.

C-c C-t C-d

M-x texinfo-delete-from-print-queue

Delete a job from the print queue; you will be prompted for the job number shown by a preceding C-c C-t C-q command (texinfo-show-tex-print-queue).

C-c C-t C-k

M-x tex-kill-job

Kill the currently running TeX job started by either texinfo-tex-region or texinfo-tex-buffer, or any other process running in the Texinfo shell buffer.

C-c C-t C-x

M-x texinfo-quit-job

Quit a TeX formatting job that has stopped because of an error by sending an x to it. When you do this, TeX preserves a record of what it did in a .log file.

C-c C-t C-l

M-x tex-recenter-output-buffer

Redisplay the shell buffer in which the TeX printing and formatting commands are run to show its most recent output.

Thus, the usual sequence of commands for formatting a buffer is as follows (with comments to the right):

C-c C-t C-b             Run texi2dvi on the buffer.
C-c C-t C-p             Print the DVI file.
C-c C-t C-q             Display the printer queue.

The Texinfo mode TeX formatting commands start a subshell in Emacs called the *tex-shell*. The texinfo-tex-command, texinfo-texindex-command, and tex-dvi-print-command commands are all run in this shell.

You can watch the commands operate in the ‘*tex-shell*’ buffer, and you can switch to and from and use the ‘*tex-shell*’ buffer as you would any other shell buffer.

The formatting and print commands depend on the values of several variables. The default values are:

    Variable                              Default value

texinfo-texi2dvi-command                  "texi2dvi"
texinfo-tex-command                       "tex"
texinfo-texindex-command                  "texindex"
texinfo-delete-from-print-queue-command   "lprm"
texinfo-tex-trailer                       "@bye"
tex-start-of-header                       "%**start"
tex-end-of-header                         "%**end"
tex-dvi-print-command                     "lpr -d"
tex-show-queue-command                    "lpq"

You can change the values of these variables with the M-x set-variable command (see Examining and Setting Variables in The GNU Emacs Manual), or with your .emacs initialization file (see Init File in The GNU Emacs Manual).

Beginning with version 20, GNU Emacs offers a user-friendly interface, called Customize, for changing values of user-definable variables. See Easy Customization Interface in The GNU Emacs Manual, for more details about this. The Texinfo variables can be found in the ‘Development/Docs/Texinfo’ group, once you invoke the M-x customize command.