On Wed, Oct 07, 2026 at 07:00:33PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> The obvious way to fix this would be change "@nabla" to "\nabla" in
> the source file:
>
> @section Laplacian (@math{\nabla ^2}) operators
>
> Unfortunately, this does not work: \nabla prints as "\nabla", not as the
> upside-down triangle symbol. This is presumably what led to using @nabla
> in the section title in the first place.
>
> Even if we could make this work in texinfo.tex (maybe using the
> \scantokens extension of e-Tex), it would not be an immediate fix for the
> current problem, as it wouldn't work with old versions of texinfo.tex,
> so authors would not have a good reason to change their Texinfo files.
> But it would avoid this problem in the first place.
I've now done this in texinfo.tex (version 2026-10-10.09), using
\scantokens, so the @section line above outputs as you expect, with the
"\nabla" sequence correctly printing as ∇.
I will probably upload the latest texinfo.tex to ftp.gnu.org in a few
days unless somebody reports further broken behaviour.
