21.3 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 @smallbook: 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 (see Top in AUC-TeX, since that program merely prepends ‘pdf’ to DVI producing tools to have PDF producing tools.

With the ‘--dvipdf’ option, texi2dvi produces PDF output by running TeX and then a DVI-to-PDF program: if the DVIPDF environment variable is set, that value is used, else the first extant among dvipdfmx, dvipdfm, dvipdf, dvi2pdf, dvitopdf. This method can support CJK typesetting better than pdftex.

With the ‘--ps’ option, texi2dvi produces PostScript instead of DVI, by running tex and then dvips (see Top in Dvips). (Or the value of the DVIPS environment variable, if set.)

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: 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 enc: Set Input Encoding) 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 the unmodified input file.

The option ‘-E’ (equivalently, ‘-e’ and ‘--expand’) does Texinfo macro expansion using makeinfo instead of the TeX implementation (see section Macro Details and Caveats). Each implementation has its own limitations and advantages. If this option is used, the string @c _texi2dvi must not appear at the beginning of a line in the source file.

For the list of all options, run ‘texi2dvi --help’.

This document was generated on October 2, 2013 using texi2html 5.0.