db2x_texixml — Make Texinfo files from Texi-XML
db2x_texixml [options...]
[xml-document]
db2x_texixml converts a Texi-XML document into one or more Texinfo documents.
If xml-document is not
given, then the document to convert comes from standard input.
The filenames of the Texinfo documents are determined by markup in the Texi-XML source. (If the filenames are not specified in the markup, then db2x_texixml attempts to deduce them from the name of the input file. However, the Texi-XML source should specify the filename, because it does not work when there are multiple output files or when the Texi-XML source comes from standard input.)
--encoding=encodingSelect the character encoding used for the output files. The
available encodings are those of iconv. The default encoding
is us-ascii.
The XML source may contain characters that are not representable in the encoding that you select; in this case the program will bomb out during processing, and you should choose another encoding. (This is guaranteed not to happen with any Unicode encoding such as UTF-8, but unfortunately not everyone is able to process Unicode texts.)
If you are using GNU’s version of iconv, you can affix
//TRANSLIT to the end of the encoding
name to attempt transliterations of any unconvertible characters in
the output. Beware, however, that the really inconvertible
characters will be turned into another of those damned question
marks. (Aren’t you sick of this?)
The suffix //TRANSLIT applied to a
Unicode encoding — in particular, utf-8//TRANSLIT — means that the output
files are to remain in Unicode, but markup-level character
translations using utf8trans are still to be done. So in
most cases, an English-language document, converted using
--encoding= will actually end up as a
US-ASCII document, but any untranslatable characters will remain as
UTF-8 without any warning whatsoever. (Note: strictly speaking this
is not “transliteration”.) This method of conversion is
a compromise over strict utf-8//TRANSLIT--encoding=
processing, which aborts if any untranslatable characters are
encountered.us-ascii
Note that man pages and Texinfo documents in non-ASCII encodings
(including UTF-8) may not be portable to older
(non-internationalized) systems, which is why the default value for
this option is us-ascii.
To suppress any automatic character mapping or encoding
conversion whatsoever, pass the option --encoding=.utf-8
--list-filesWrite a list of all the output files to standard output, in addition to normal processing.
--output-dir=dirSpecify the directory where the output files are placed. The default is the current working directory.
This option is ignored if the output is to be written to
standard output (triggered by the option --to-stdout).
--to-stdoutWrite the output to standard output instead of to individual files.
If this option is used even when there are supposed to be multiple output documents, then everything is concatenated to standard output. But beware that most other programs will not accept this concatenated output.
This option is incompatible with --list-files, obviously.
--infoPipe the Texinfo output to makeinfo, creating Info files directly instead of Texinfo files.
--plaintextPipe the Texinfo output to makeinfo --no-headers, thereby creating
plain text files.
--helpShow brief usage information and exit.
--versionShow version and exit.
This program uses certain other programs for its operation. If they are not in their default installed locations, then use the following options to set their location:
--utf8trans-program=path, --utf8trans-map=charmapUse the character map charmap with the utf8trans program, included with
docbook2X, found under path.
--iconv-program=pathThe location of the iconv program, used for encoding conversions.
Texinfo language compatibility. The Texinfo files generated by db2x_texixml sometimes require Texinfo version 4.7 (the latest version) to work properly. In particular:
db2x_texixml relies on makeinfo to automatically add punctuation after a @ref if it it not already there. Otherwise the hyperlink will not work in the Info reader (although makeinfo will not emit any error).
The new @comma{} command is used for
commas (,) occurring inside argument
lists to Texinfo commands, to disambiguate it from the comma used
to separate different arguments. The only alternative otherwise
would be to translate , to
. which is obviously undesirable (but
earlier docbook2X versions did this).
If you cannot use version 4.7 of makeinfo, you can still use a sed script to perform manually the procedure just outlined.
Relation of Texi-XML with the XML output format of
makeinfo.
The Texi-XML format used by docbook2X is different and incompatible with the XML
format generated by makeinfo with its
--xml option. This situation arose
partly because the Texi-XML format of docbook2X was designed and
implemented independently before the appearance of
makeinfo’s XML
format. Also Texi-XML is very much geared towards being
machine-generated from other XML
formats, while there seems to be no non-trivial
applications of makeinfo’s XML format. So there is
no reason at this point for docbook2X to adopt makeinfo’s XML format in lieu of
Texi-XML.
Text wrapping in menus is utterly broken for non-ASCII text. It is probably also broken everywhere else in the output, but that would be makeinfo’s fault.
--list-files might not work
correctly with --info. Specifically,
when the output Info file get too big, makeinfo will decide to split it into
parts named abc.info-1abc.info-2abc.info-3