Texinfo - The GNU Documentation System

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Texinfo is the official documentation format of the GNU project. It was invented by Richard Stallman and Bob Chassell many years ago, loosely based on Brian Reid's Scribe and other formatting languages of the time. It is used by many non-GNU projects as well.

Texinfo uses a single source file to produce output in a number of formats, both online and printed (dvi, html, info, pdf, xml, etc.). This means that instead of writing different documents for online information and another for a printed manual, you need write only one document. And when the work is revised, you need revise only that one document. The Texinfo system is well-integrated with GNU Emacs.

Help wanted: I would be very grateful for help maintaining Texinfo. Standalone Info in particular could be maintained more or less independently of the other programs. I also have a long list of bug reports and feature requests for makeinfo, the Texinfo language, etc. For an overview of some of them, see the TODO file in the distribution. Please write me if you can help.

Basics

Mailing lists

bug-texinfo@gnu.org
The main address for bug reporting and developer discussion (web archive, plain text archive).
help-texinfo@gnu.org
For Texinfo authoring help and discussion (archive, plain text archive).
texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org
To discuss the latest test releases and development issues (archive).
texinfo-cvs@texinfo.org
To get mail with every CVS commit to the repository (archive).

Anyone is welcome to subscribe to any or all of these. Do so by sending a message to the corresponding -request address, for example bug-texinfo-request@gnu.org. A single line

subscribe yourusername@yourdomain.dom
in both the body and the subject works best. The plain text archives may be especially useful for Texinfo, since the web archiver considers many Texinfo @-commands as email addresses and therefore mangles them.

More Texinfo

Documentation:

Programs:

If you know of free software or documentation that would be useful to add here, please email bug-texinfo@gnu.org.


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Updated: $Date: 2005/04/15 16:14:33 $ $Author: karl $