Running Linux, 5th Edition

Texinfo

Texinfo is a text-formatting system used by the GNU Project to produce both online documentation in the form of hypertext Info pages, and printed manuals through T_EX from a single-source file. By providing Texinfo source, users can convert the documentation to Info, HTML, DVI, PostScript, PDF, or plain text files.

Texinfo is documented completely through its own Info pages, which are readable within Emacs (using the C-h i command) or a separate Info reader, such as info. If the GNU Info pages are installed in your system, complete Texinfo documentation is contained therein. Just as you'll find yourself using groff to write a manual page, you'll use Texinfo to write an Info document.

Writing the Texinfo Source

In this section, we present a simple Texinfo source file—chunks at a time—and describe what each chunk does as we go along.

Our Texinfo source file will be called vacuum.texi and describe a fictitious vacuum command. As usual, you can enter the source using a plain-text editor:

\input texinfo @c -*-texinfo-*-
@c %**start of header
@setfilename vacuum.info
@settitle The Empty Info File
@setchapternewpage odd
@c %**end of header

This is the header of the Texinfo source. The first line is a T_EX command used to input the Texinfo macros when producing printed documentation. Commands in Texinfo begin with the "at" sign, @. The @c command begins a comment; here, the comment -*-texinfo-*- is a tag that tells Emacs this is a Texinfo source file so that Emacs can set the proper major ...