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Using Texinfo, you can create a printed document with the normal features of a book, including chapters, sections, cross references, and indices. From the same Texinfo source file, you can create a menu-driven, online Info file with nodes, menus, cross references, and indices. You can also create from that same source file an HTML output file suitable for use with a web browser. The GNU Emacs Manual is a good example of a Texinfo file, as is this manual.
To make a printed document, you process a Texinfo source file with the TeX typesetting program (but the Texinfo language is very different from TeX's usual language, plain TeX). This creates a DVI file that you can typeset and print as a book or report (see section Formatting and Printing Hardcopy).
To output an Info file, process your Texinfo source with the
makeinfo utility or Emacs's texinfo-format-buffer command.
You can install the result in your Info tree (see section Installing an Info File).
To output an HTML file, process your Texinfo source with makeinfo
using the `--html' option. You can (for example) install the
result on your web site.
If you are a programmer and would like to contribute to the GNU project
by implementing additional output formats for Texinfo, that would be
excellent. But please do not write a separate translator texi2foo for
your favorite format foo! That is the hard way to do the job, and makes
extra work in subsequent maintenance, since the Texinfo language is
continually being enhanced and updated. Instead, the best approach is
modify makeinfo to generate the new format, as it does now for
Info and HTML.
TeX works with virtually all printers; Info works with virtually all computer terminals; the HTML output works with virtually all web browsers. Thus Texinfo can be used by almost any computer user.
A Texinfo source file is a plain ASCII file containing text and @-commands (words preceded by an `@') that tell the typesetting and formatting programs what to do. You may edit a Texinfo file with any text editor; but it is especially convenient to use GNU Emacs since that editor has a special mode, called Texinfo mode, that provides various Texinfo-related features. (See section Using Texinfo Mode.)
Before writing a Texinfo source file, you should learn about nodes, menus, cross references, and the rest, for example by reading this manual.
You can use Texinfo to create both online help and printed manuals; moreover, Texinfo is freely redistributable. For these reasons, Texinfo is the official documentation format of the GNU project. More information is available at the GNU documentation web page.
From time to time, proposals are made to generate traditional Unix man pages from Texinfo source. This is not likely to ever be supported, because man pages have a very strict conventional format. Merely enhancing @command{makeinfo} to output troff format would be insufficient. Generating a good man page therefore requires a completely different source than the typical Texinfo applications of generating a good user manual or a good reference manual. This makes generating man pages incompatible with the Texinfo design goal of not having to document the same information in different ways for different output formats. You might as well just write the man page directly.
If you wish to support man pages, the program @command{help2man} may be useful; it generates a traditional man page from the `--help' output of a program. In fact, this is currently used to generate man pages for the Texinfo programs themselves. It is free software written by Brendan O'Dea, available from http://www.ozemail.com.au/~bod/help2man.tar.gz.
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