20.3 Format with texi2dvi

The texi2dvi command automatically runs both TeX and texindex as many times as necessary to produce a DVI file with sorted indices and all cross-references resolved. It is therefore simpler than manually executing the tex—texindex—tex—tex sequence described in the previous section.

To run texi2dvi on an input file ‘foo.texi’, do this (where ‘prompt$ ’ is your shell prompt):

prompt$ texi2dvi foo.texi

As shown in this example, the input filenames to texi2dvi must include any extension (‘.texi’, ‘.texinfo’, etc.). Under MS-DOS and perhaps in other circumstances, you may need to run ‘sh texi2dvi foo.texi’ instead of relying on the operating system to invoke the shell on the ‘texi2dvi’ script.

One useful option to texi2dvi is ‘--command=cmd’. This inserts cmd on a line by itself after the @setfilename in a temporary copy of the input file before running TeX. With this, you can specify different printing formats, such as @smallbook (see section Printing “Small” Books), @afourpaper (see section Printing on A4 Paper), or @pagesizes (see section @pagesizes [width][, height]: Custom Page Sizes), without actually changing the document source. (You can also do this on a site-wide basis with ‘texinfo.cnf’; see section Preparing for TeX).

With the ‘--pdf’ option, texi2dvi produces PDF output instead of DVI (see section PDF Output), by running pdftex instead of tex. Alternatively, the command texi2pdf is an abbreviation for running ‘texi2dvi --pdf’. The command pdftexi2dvi is also supported as a convenience to AUC-TeX users, since the latter merely prepends ‘pdf’ to DVI producing tools to have PDF producing tools.

texi2dvi can also be used to process LaTeX files; simply run ‘texi2dvi filename.ext’.

Normally texi2dvi is able to guess the input file language by its contents and file name suffix. If, however, it fails to do so you can specify the input language using ‘--language=lang’ command line option, where lang is either ‘latex’ or ‘texinfo’.

texi2dvi will use etex (or pdfetex) if they are available; these extended versions of TeX are not required, and the DVI (or PDF) output is identical, but they simplify the TeX programming in some cases, and provide additional tracing information when debugging ‘texinfo.tex’.

Several options are provided for handling documents, written in character sets other than ASCII. The ‘--translate-file=file’ option instructs texi2dvi to translate input into internal TeX character set using translation file file (see TCX files: (web2c)TCX files section `TCX files: Character translations' in Web2c: A TeX implementation).

The options ‘--recode’ and ‘--recode-from=enc’ allow conversion of an input document before running TeX. The ‘--recode’ option recodes the document from encoding specified by ‘@documentencoding’ command (see section documentencoding) to plain 7-bit ‘texinfo’ encoding.

The option ‘--recode-from=enc’ recodes the document from enc encoding to the encoding specified by ‘@documentencoding’. This is useful, for example, if the document is written in ‘UTF-8’ encoding and an equivalent 8-bit encoding is supported by makeinfo.

Both ‘--recode’ and ‘--recode-from=enc’ use recode utility to perform the conversion. If recode fails to process the file, texi2dvi prints a warning and continues using unmodified input file.

For a list of other options, run ‘texi2dvi --help’.