Ubuntu Manpage: docbook2x-texi - Convert DocBook to Texinfo

NAME

       docbook2x-texi - Convert DocBook to Texinfo

SYNOPSIS

       docbook2x-texi [options] xml-document

DESCRIPTION

       docbook2x-texi  converts  the given DocBook XML document into one or more Texinfo documents.  By default,
       these Texinfo documents will be output to the current directory.

       The docbook2x-texi command is a wrapper script for a two-step conversion process.  See the section  “CON‐
       VERSION PROCESS” below for details.

OPTIONS

The available options are essentially the union of the options for db2x_xsltproc(1) and db2x_texixml(1).

Some commonly-used options are listed below:

--encoding=encoding
Sets the character encoding of the output.

--string-param parameter=value
Sets a stylesheet parameter (options that affect how the output looks). See “Stylesheet parame‐
ters” below for the parameters that can be set.

--sgml Accept an SGML source document as input instead of XML.

STYLESHEET PARAMETERS
captions-display-as-headings
Brief. Use heading markup for minor captions?

Default setting. 0 (boolean false)

If true, title content in some (formal) objects are rendered with the Texinfo @heading commands.

If false, captions are rendered as an emphasized paragraph.

links-use-pxref
Brief. Translate link using @pxref

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, link is translated with the hypertext followed by the cross reference in parentheses.

Otherwise, the hypertext content serves as the cross-reference name marked up using @ref. Typical‐
ly info displays this contruct badly.

explicit-node-names
Brief. Insist on manually constructed Texinfo node names

Default setting. 0 (boolean false)

Elements in the source document can influence the Texinfo node name generation specifying either a
xreflabel, or for the sectioning elements, a title with role='texinfo-node' in the *info contain‐
er.

However, for the majority of source documents, explicit Texinfo node names are not available, and
the stylesheet tries to generate a reasonable one instead, e.g. from the normal title of an ele‐
ment. The generated name may not be optimal. If this option is set and the stylesheet needs to
generate a name, a warning is emitted and generate-id is always used for the name.

When the hashtable extension is not available, the stylesheet cannot check for node name colli‐
sions, and in this case, setting this option and using explicit node names are recommended.

This option is not set (i.e. false) by default.
Note

The absolute fallback for generating node names is using the XSLT function generate-id, and the
stylesheet always emits a warning in this case regardless of the setting of explicit-node-names.

show-comments
Brief. Display comment elements?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, comments will be displayed, otherwise they are suppressed. Comments here refers to the
comment element, which will be renamed remark in DocBook V4.0, not XML comments (<-- like this
-->) which are unavailable.

funcsynopsis-decoration
Brief. Decorate elements of a FuncSynopsis?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, elements of the FuncSynopsis will be decorated (e.g. bold or italic). The decoration is
controlled by functions that can be redefined in a customization layer.

function-parens
Brief. Generate parentheses after a function?

Default setting. 0 (boolean false)

If true, the formatting of a <function> element will include generated parenthesis.

refentry-display-name
Brief. Output NAME header before 'RefName'(s)?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, a "NAME" section title is output before the list of 'RefName's.

manvolnum-in-xref
Brief. Output manvolnum as part of refentry cross-reference?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

if true, the manvolnum is used when cross-referencing refentrys, either with xref or citerefentry.

prefer-textobjects
Brief. Prefer textobject over imageobject?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, the textobject in a mediaobject is preferred over any imageobject.

(Of course, for output formats other than Texinfo, you usually want to prefer the imageobject, but
Info is a text-only format.)

In addition to the values true and false, this parameter may be set to 2 to indicate that both the
text and the images should be output. You may want to do this because some Texinfo viewers can
read images. Note that the Texinfo @image command has its own mechanism for switching between text
and image output — but we do not use this here.

The default is true.

semantic-decorations
Brief. Use Texinfo semantic inline markup?

Default setting. 1 (boolean true)

If true, the semantic inline markup of DocBook is translated into (the closest) Texinfo equiva‐
lent. This is the default.

However, because the Info format is limited to plain text, the semantic inline markup is often
distinguished by using explicit quotes, which may not look good. You can set this option to false
to suppress these. (For finer control over the inline formatting, you can use your own
stylesheet.)

custom-localization-file
Brief. URI of XML document containing custom localization data

Default setting. (blank)

This parameter specifies the URI of a XML document that describes text translations (and other lo‐
cale-specific information) that is needed by the stylesheet to process the DocBook document.

The text translations pointed to by this parameter always override the default text translations
(from the internal parameter localization-file). If a particular translation is not present here,
the corresponding default translation is used as a fallback.

This parameter is primarily for changing certain punctuation characters used in formatting the
source document. The settings for punctuation characters are often specific to the source docu‐
ment, but can also be dependent on the locale.

To not use custom text translations, leave this parameter as the empty string.

custom-l10n-data
Brief. XML document containing custom localization data

Default setting. document($custom-localization-file)

This parameter specifies the XML document that describes text translations (and other locale-spe‐
cific information) that is needed by the stylesheet to process the DocBook document.

This parameter is internal to the stylesheet. To point to an external XML document with a URI or
a file name, you should use the custom-localization-file parameter instead.

However, inside a custom stylesheet (not on the command-line) this parameter can be set to the
XPath expression document(''), which will cause the custom translations directly embedded inside
the custom stylesheet to be read.

author-othername-in-middle
Brief. Is othername in author a middle name?

Default setting. 1

If true, the othername of an author appears between the firstname and surname. Otherwise, other‐
name is suppressed.

output-file
Brief. Name of the Info file

Default setting. (blank)

This parameter specifies the name of the final Info file, overriding the setting in the document
itself and the automatic selection in the stylesheet. If the document is a set, this parameter has
no effect.
Important

Do not include the .info extension in the name.

(Note that this parameter has nothing to do with the name of the Texi-XML output by the XSLT processor
you are running this stylesheet from.)

directory-category
Brief. The categorization of the document in the Info directory

Default setting. (blank)

This is set to the category that the document should go under in the Info directory of installed
Info files. For example, General Commands.
Note

Categories may also be set directly in the source document. But if this parameter is not empty,
then it always overrides the setting in the source document.

directory-description
Brief. The description of the document in the Info directory

Default setting. (blank)

This is a short description of the document that appears in the Info directory of installed Info
files. For example, An Interactive Plotting Program.
Note

Menu descriptions may also be set directly in the source document. But if this parameter is not
empty, then it always overrides the setting in the source document.

index-category
Brief. The Texinfo index to use

Default setting. cp

The Texinfo index for indexterm and index is specified using the role attribute. If the above ele‐
ments do not have a role, then the default specified by this parameter is used.

The predefined indices are:

c, cp Concept index

f, fn Function index

v, vr Variable index

k, ky Keystroke index

p, pg Program index

d, tp Data type index

User-defined indices are not yet supported.

qanda-defaultlabel
Brief. Sets the default for defaultlabel on QandASet.

Default setting.

If no defaultlabel attribute is specified on a QandASet, this value is used. It must be one of the
legal values for the defaultlabel attribute.

qandaset-generate-toc
Brief. Is a Table of Contents created for QandASets?

Default setting.

If true, a ToC is constructed for QandASets.

EXAMPLES

       $ docbook2x-texi tdg.xml
       $ docbook2x-texi --encoding=utf-8//TRANSLIT tdg.xml
       $ docbook2x-texi --string-param semantic-decorations=0 tdg.xml
       .fi

CONVERSION PROCESS

Converting to Texinfo
DocBook documents are converted to Texinfo in two steps:

1. The DocBook source is converted by a XSLT stylesheet into an intermediate XML format, Texi-XML.

Texi-XML is simpler than DocBook and closer to the Texinfo format; it is intended to make the
stylesheets’ job easier.

The stylesheet for this purpose is in xslt/texi/docbook.xsl. For portability, it should always be
referred to by the following URI:

http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/latest/xslt/texi/docbook.xsl

Run this stylesheet with db2x_xsltproc(1).

Customizing. You can also customize the output by creating your own XSLT stylesheet — changing para‐
meters or adding new templates — and importing xslt/texi/docbook.xsl.

2. Texi-XML is converted to the actual Texinfo files by db2x_texixml(1).

The docbook2x-texi command does both steps automatically, but if any problems occur, you can see the er‐
rors more clearly if you do each step separately:

$ db2x_xsltproc -s texi mydoc.xml -o mydoc.txml
$ db2x_texixml mydoc.txml
.fi

Options to the conversion stylesheet are described
in the Texinfo stylesheets
reference.

Character set conversion
When translating XML to legacy ASCII-based formats with poor support for Unicode, such as man pages and
Texinfo, there is always the problem that Unicode characters in the source document also have to be
translated somehow.

A straightforward character set conversion from Unicode does not suffice, because the target character
set, usually US-ASCII or ISO Latin-1, do not contain common characters such as dashes and directional
quotation marks that are widely used in XML documents. But document formatters (man and Texinfo) allow
such characters to be entered by a markup escape: for example, \(lq for the left directional quote “.
And if a markup-level escape is not available, an ASCII transliteration might be used: for example, using
the ASCII less-than sign < for the angle quotation mark ⟨.

So the Unicode character problem can be solved in two steps:

1. utf8trans(1), a program included in docbook2X, maps Unicode characters to markup-level escapes or
transliterations.

Since there is not necessarily a fixed, official mapping of Unicode characters, utf8trans can read in
user-modifiable character mappings expressed in text files and apply them. (Unlike most character set
converters.)

In charmaps/man/roff.charmap and charmaps/man/texi.charmap are character maps that may be used for
man-page and Texinfo conversion. The programs db2x_manxml(1) and db2x_texixml(1) will apply these
character maps, or another character map specified by the user, automatically.

2. The rest of the Unicode text is converted to some other character set (encoding). For example, a
French document with accented characters (such as é) might be converted to ISO Latin 1.

This step is applied after utf8trans character mapping, using the iconv(1) encoding conversion tool.
Both db2x_manxml(1) and db2x_texixml(1) can call iconv(1) automatically when producing their output.

FILES

       /usr/local/share/docbook2X/xslt/texi/docbook.xsl
       /usr/local/share/docbook2X/xslt/backend/db2x_texixml.xsl
       /usr/local/share/docbook2X/xslt/catalog.xml
       /usr/local/share/docbook2X/charmaps/texi.charmap.xml
       /usr/local/share/docbook2X/charmaps/texi.charmap.xml

       The above files are distributed and installed by the docbook2X package.

NOTES

       The docbook2man or the docbook2x-texi command described in this manual page come from the docbook2X pack‐
       age.   It should not be confused with the command of the same name from the obsoleted docbook-utils pack‐
       age.

LIMITATIONS

       • Internally there is one long pipeline of programs which your document goes through. If any  segment  of
         the  pipeline  fails  (even trivially, like from mistyped program options), the resulting errors can be
         difficult to decipher — in this case, try running the components of docbook2X separately.

AUTHOR

       Steve Cheng <stevecheng@users.sourceforge.net>.

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

OPTIONS

EXAMPLES

CONVERSION PROCESS

FILES

NOTES

LIMITATIONS

AUTHOR

SEE ALSO