texinfo/tp/README Copyright 2011-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. texi2any is a Perl program for converting Texinfo input to to divers output formats. Texinfo::Parser (hence the directory name tp) is a Perl module for parsing Texinfo code into a tree representing the Texinfo code structure. These other modules and libraries are required (all have been standard parts of Perl for years, at least since 5.7.3): Carp, Config, Data::Dumper, Encode, File::Basename, File::Spec Getopt::Long, Unicode::Normalize, Storable Unicode::Collate (also a standard module since 5.7.3) is required for correct index sorting. texi2any also uses the less widely-available modules: Locale::Messages, Unicode::EastAsianWidth, Text::Unidecode For these, internal versions are included, and are installed and used as part of Texinfo (not disturbing the Perl installation at all) (although see the output of 'configure --help' for how to use externally installed modules). Archive::Zip is needed for the EPUB output format final file creation. It is not included in Texinfo; it is detected at runtime and an error is issued if it cannot be loaded. To run the tests you also need: Test::More, Data::Compare, Test::Deep On Debian-based distros, Test::More is part of perl-modules and thus installed with perl, the packages corresponding to the other modules are named: libdata-compare-perl libtest-deep-perl The tests are in the subdirectories t/ and test/. The tests in t/ test the Perl modules used by the makeinfo command, and the tests in test/ test the command itself. If you want to delve into making a new backend, the documentation in tp/Texinfo/Convert/Converter.pm is a good starting point, as it describes the existing backends and other places to look. To do a good job, expect to spend a lot of time making it do the right thing with the existing tests. The Texinfo parser builds a complicated parse tree. It can output a lot of debug information about the tree, and what it's doing generally. For example, these commands output the tree (in different forms): makeinfo -c DUMP_TREE=1 -c TEXINFO_OUTPUT_FORMAT=parse document.texi makeinfo -c TEXINFO_OUTPUT_FORMAT=debugtree document.texi In addition (or instead) setting the DEBUG configuration variable will dump more information about what it's doing. Sometime the messages on syntax errors can be incomplete because of the system used to set the paths. It is possible in that case to use something along the following line to test the validity of one source file: perl -c -I '.' -I './maintain/lib/libintl-perl/lib/' -I './maintain/lib/Unicode-EastAsianWidth/lib/' -I './maintain/lib/Text-Unidecode/lib' Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm