21.2 Format with texi2dvi

The texi2dvi program takes care of all the steps for producing a TeX DVI file from a Texinfo document. Similarly, texi2pdf produces a PDF file.

To run texi2dvi or texi2pdf on an input file foo.texi, do this (where ‘prompt$ ’ is your shell prompt):

prompt$ texi2dvi foo.texi
prompt$ texi2pdf foo.texi

As shown in this example, the input filenames to texi2dvi and texi2pdf must include any extension, such as ‘.texi’. (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 @smallbook), @afourpaper (see A4 Paper), or @pagesizes (see @pagesizes), without actually changing the document source. (You can also do this on a site-wide basis with texinfo.cnf; see Preparing for TeX).

With the --pdf option, texi2dvi produces PDF output instead of DVI (see PDF Output), by running pdftex instead of tex. Alternatively, the command texi2pdf is an abbreviation for running ‘texi2dvi --pdf’. The command pdftexi2dvi is also provided as a convenience for AUC-TeX (see AUC-TeX, as it prefers to merely prepend ‘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 program extant among dvipdfmx, dvipdfm, dvipdf, dvi2pdf, dvitopdf. This method generally supports CJK typesetting better than pdftex.

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

texi2dvi can also be used to process LaTeX files. Normally texi2dvi is able to guess the input file language by its contents and file name extension; however, if it guesses wrong you can explicitly 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; this extended version of TeX is not required, and the DVI output is identical, but it runs faster in some cases, and provide additional tracing information when debugging texinfo.tex. (These days, pdftex and pdfetex are exactly the same, but we still run pdfetex to cater to ancient TeX installations.)

The option -E (equivalently, -e and --expand) does Texinfo macro expansion using makeinfo instead of the TeX implementation (see Macro Details). 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 a list of all the options, run ‘texi2dvi --help’.