12.4 Inserting Accents

Here is a table with the commands Texinfo provides for inserting floating accents. They all need an argument, the character to accent, which can either be given in braces as usual (@'{e}), or, as a special case, the braces can be omitted, in which case the argument is the next character (@'e). This is to make the source as convenient as possible to type and read, since accented characters are very common in some languages.

If the command is alphabetic, such as @dotaccent, then there must be a space between the command name and argument if braces are not used. If the command is non-alphabetic, such as @', then there must not be a space; the argument is the very next character.

Exception: the argument to @tieaccent must be enclosed in braces (since it is two characters instead of one).

To get the true accented characters output in Info, not just the ASCII transliterations, it is necessary to specify @documentencoding with an encoding which supports the required characters (see @documentencoding). In this case, you can also use non-ASCII (e.g., pre-accented) characters in the source file.

This table lists the Texinfo commands for inserting other characters commonly used in languages other than English.