On 3/3/19, Gavin Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > I went looking for past emails about the reasoning behind the choices > of escape char but found nothing. Did you look into this when you > wrote texindex?
Karl wanted the escape character to change for index files: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2014-02/msg00052.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2015-08/msg00162.html As far as I know the only barrier to changing the escape character is that old texindex is still installed. At some point it would be good if texindex could be made faster - possibly rewritten in a faster language than awk (or if awk itself could be made faster) (go? haskell? although Texinfo may have too many languages in it already). If C texindex is /usr/bin/texindex then running TEXINDEX=/usr/bin/texindex texi2pdf texinfo.texi noticeably reduces the delay between runs of TeX (by a second or so) (where texinfo.texi is Texinfo's own manual). It doesn't matter very much of course, as TeX itself takes much longer to run than texindex for large input files.
