NAME
db2x_texixml - Make Texinfo files from Texi-XML
SYNOPSIS
db2x_texixml \kx
[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 GNUs 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. (Arent 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=utf-8//TRANSLIT
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
--encoding=us-ascii
processing, which aborts if any untranslatable characters are
encountered.
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-files
Write a list of all the output files to standard output,
in addition to normal processing.
--output-dir=dir
Specify 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-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(1),
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(1) program, included with docbook2X, found
under path.
--iconv-program=path
The location of the
iconv(1) program, used for encoding
conversions.
NOTES
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(1)
with its --xml option.
This situation arose partly because the Texi-XML format
of docbook2X was designed and implemented independently
before the appearance
of makeinfos 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 makeinfos XML format.
So there is no reason at this point for docbook2X
to adopt makeinfos XML format
in lieu of Texi-XML.
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 makeinfos 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.
AUTHOR
Steve Cheng <stevecheng@users.sourceforge.net>.
SEE ALSO
The docbook2X manual (in Texinfo or HTML format) fully describes
how to convert DocBook to man pages and Texinfo.
Up-to-date information about this program
can be found
at the
.
The input to db2x_texixml is defined by the XML DTD
present at dtd/Texi-XML in the docbook2X
distribution.
