3.1 db2x_texixml

Name

db2x_texixml — Make Texinfo files from Texi-XML

Synopsis

db2x_texixml [options]... [xml-document]

Description

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.)

Options

--encoding=encoding

Select the character encoding used for the output files. The available encodings are those of iconv(1). 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(1), 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?)

--list-files

Write a list of all the output files to standard output, in addition to normal processing.

--to-stdout

Write 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.

--info

Pipe the Texinfo output to makeinfo, creating Info files directly instead of Texinfo files.

--plaintext

Pipe the Texinfo output to makeinfo --no-headers, thereby creating plain text files.

--help

Show brief usage information and exit.

--version

Show 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=charmap

Use the character map charmap with the utf8trans program, included with docbook2X, found under path.

--iconv-program=path

The location of the iconv(1) program, used for encoding conversions.

Notes

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.

Bugs

• 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-1, abc.info-2, abc.info-3, etc. db2x_texixml does not know exactly how many of these files there are, though you can just do an ls to find out.

See Also

The input to db2x_texixml is defined by the XML DTD present at dtd/Texi-XML in the docbook2X distribution.