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3 Usage

In the following, I describe the use of texi2latex with the shell script of the same name. Probably it only works on Linux. It's very simple though. If you can adapt it to other systems, I'll be glad to hear about it. If the shell script doesn't work for you, see Step-by-step conversion.

Let's assume your original Texinfo document is stored in the file mymanual.texi. Then you can convert it to its LaTeX equivalent mymanual.ltx by saying

     texi2latex mymanual.texi

(you may omit the extension). By the way, the resulting file extension .ltx may be unusual, but it avoids problems with an existing mymanual.tex (maybe from a Texinfo run). However, if you want to use texi2latex and texi2dvi parallely, you have to delete mymanual.aux and mymanual.toc before you switch to the respective other program.

Note that mymanual.ltx is ready to be processed by latex as well as by pdflatex. For the latter, the abilities of LaTeX's hyperref package are extensively used.

Also note that plain LaTeX and pdfLaTeX can only deal with certain image formats. Plain LaTeX usually only can include EPS files. pdfLaTeX can deal with PDF, JPEG, and PNG. So it may be necessary to convert images.

When you call latex or pdflatex on mymanual.ltx, a file makeindex.bat is generated in the current directory. This is a shell script that should work on both Linux and Windows. If you call it, all indices of your document are created. The program makeindex – usually included in modern TeX distributions – is needed for this.