Copyright (C) 1992, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 2000, 01, 02 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. This is the README file for the GNU Texinfo distribution. The primary distribution point is ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/ and the primary home page is http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/, secondary home page at http://texinfo.org/. Mailing lists: - bug-texinfo@gnu.org for bug reports or enhancement suggestions, archived at ftp://ftp-mailing-list-archives.gnu.org/bug-texinfo/. - help-texinfo@gnu.org for authoring questions and general discussion. archived at ftp://ftp-mailing-list-archives.gnu.org/help-texinfo/. - texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org for pretests of new releases, archived at ftp://ftp.texinfo.org/texinfo/texinfo-pretest-archive/. There are as yet no corresponding newsgroups. For bug reports, please include enough information for the maintainers to reproduce the problem. Generally speaking, that means: - the contents of any input files necessary to reproduce the bug (crucial!). - a description of the problem and any samples of the erroneous output. - the version number of Texinfo and the program(s) involved (use --version). - hardware, operating system, and compiler versions (uname -a). - any unusual options you gave to configure (see config.status). - anything else that you think would be helpful. Patches are most welcome; if possible, please make them with diff -c and include ChangeLog entries. When sending email, please do not encode or split the messages in any way if at all possible; it's easier to deal with one large message than many small ones. GNU shar is a convenient way of packaging multiple and/or binary files for email. For generic installation instructions on compiling and installing this Automake-based distribution, please read the file `INSTALL'. Installation notes specific to Texinfo: * The Info tree uses a file `dir' as its root node; the `dir-example' file in this distribution is included as a possible starting point. Use it, modify it, or ignore it just as you like. * You can create a file texinfo.cnf to be read by TeX when processing Texinfo manuals. For example, you might like to use @afourpaper by default. See the `Preparing for TeX' node in texinfo.txi for more details. You don't have to create the file if you have nothing to put in it. * If your info files are not in $prefix/info, you may wish to add a line #define DEFAULT_INFOPATH "/mydir1:/mydir2:..." to config.h after running configure. * For instructions on compiling this distribution with DJGPP tools for MS-DOS and MS-Windows, see the file djgpp/README. If you would like to contribute to the GNU project by implementing additional documentation output formats for Texinfo, that would be great. But please do not write a separate translator texi2foo for your favorite format foo! That is the hard way to do the job, and makes extra work in subsequent maintenance, since the Texinfo language is continually being enhanced and updated. Instead, the best approach is modify Makeinfo to generate the new format, as it does now for Info, HTML, XML, and DocBook. If you want to convert from DocBook to Texinfo, please see http://docbook2X.sourceforge.net/. This distribution includes the following files, among others: README This file. NEWS Summary of new features by release. INTRODUCTION Brief introduction to the system, and how to create readable files from the Texinfo source files in this distribution. Texinfo source files (in ./doc): texinfo.txi Describes the Texinfo language and many of the associated tools. It tells how to use Texinfo to write documentation, how to use Texinfo mode in GNU Emacs, TeX, makeinfo, and the Emacs Lisp Texinfo formatting commands. info.texi This manual tells you how to use Info. This document comes as part of GNU Emacs. If you do not have Emacs, you can format this Texinfo source file with makeinfo or TeX and then read the resulting Info file with the standalone Info reader that is part of this distribution. info-stnd.texi This manual tells you how to use the standalone GNU Info reader that is included in this distribution as C source (./info). Printing related files: doc/texinfo.tex This TeX definitions file tells the TeX program how to typeset a Texinfo file into a DVI file ready for printing. util/texindex.c This file contains the source for the `texindex' program that generates sorted indices used by TeX when typesetting a file for printing. util/texi2dvi This is a shell script for producing an indexed DVI file using TeX and texindex. Source files for standalone C programs (./lib, ./makeinfo, ./info): makeinfo/makeinfo.c This file contains the source for the `makeinfo' program that you can use to create an Info file from a Texinfo file. info/info.c This file contains the source for the `info' program that you can use to view Info files on an ASCII terminal. Installation files: configure This file creates creates a Makefile which in turn creates an `info' or `makeinfo' executable, or a C sources distribution. configure.in This is a template for creating `configure' using Autoconf. Makefile.in This is a template for `configure' to use to make a Makefile. Created by Automake. Makefile.am This is a template for Automake to use to make a Makefile.in. Other files: fixfonts This is a shell script to install the `lcircle10' TeX fonts as an alias for the `circle10' fonts. In some older TeX distributions the names are different. tex3patch This handles a bug for version 3.0 of TeX that does not occur in more recent versions.