I recently started using texinfo.tex from texinfo version 4.2, and I
discovered a problem in the PDF bookmarks generated by pdftex. If the
bookmark text contains certain "active" characters, you get funny TeX
macros in the bookmark. This shows up, for example, in the GNU binutils
document for the chapter entitled "c++filt". To test the extent of the
problem, I renamed this chapter "c++filt\~^_|<>$".
Here is what I got for the bookmark text when using the pdftexinfo file
from RedHat 6.2 (labelled as version 1999-03-26.17):
c++filt{\}penalty @M ^_|<>$
Not too bad -- the backslash and tilde didn't come out right but
everything else is OK.
Now here is what I get with version 4.2 of texinfo:
c{@char 43}{@char 43}filt{@rawbackslashxx}{@char 126}{@hat}_{@char
124}{@less}{@gtr}$
Only the underscore and dollar are not messed up. The plus characters
are obviously the biggest problem since those appear in the original
document.
My TeX skills are rather limited. I managed to come up with a patch to
fix the plus characters, but it bothers me that it isn't consistent with
the existing hacks to handle underscores and braces and that it doesn't
handle the other characters. It seems like it would be much better to
solve this problem in a general way, but I have no idea how to do it.
Anyway, here is my patch.
*** texinfo.tex.orig Sat Apr 27 20:56:08 2002
--- texinfo.tex Sat Apr 27 21:00:43 2002
***************
*** 989,994 ****
--- 989,995 ----
\closein 1
\indexnofonts
\def\tt{}
+ \catcode`+=\other
\let\_ = \normalunderscore
% Thanh's hack / proper braces in bookmarks
\edef\mylbrace{\iftrue \string{\else}\fi}\let\{=\mylbrace
