On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 07:16:01AM +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > In the info file I read the following about `@example`. > > Caution: Do not use tabs in the lines of an example! (Or > anywhere else in Texinfo, except in verbatim environments.) TeX > treats tabs as single spaces, and that is not what they look > like. > > However, this is not fully correct. Consider the following input > file. > > ``` > \input texinfo > > @example > no leading space > leading tab another tab > eight leading spaces > @end example > > @bye > ``` > > If processed with `texi2pdf`, the leading tab vanishes completely (as > shown in the image); it is not treated as a single space.
This part of the manual is correct: "TeX treats tabs as single spaces" This part is confusing: "and that is not what they look like" This is confusing because this conflates a space character (hex 0x20) with a space - a physical space between words. It is not true that a space character input to TeX always has the same appearance in the output. At the start of a line, a tab character is treated the same as a space character, i.e. it is ignored.
