GNU Texinfo

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

The basics:

• The latest official release as a gzipped tar file or unpacked for browsing. Also on all GNU mirrors.
• The complete manual in HTML format from the current official release.
• The latest texinfo.tex file used for converting Texinfo source to DVI files for printing, using the TeX typesetting system.
• If available, the latest pretest by ftp (alternate location). Pretests are inherently unstable, may not work, etc.

Volunteers wanted

Mailing lists

bug-texinfo@gnu.org

The main address for bug reporting and developer discussion (archive).

help-texinfo@gnu.org

For Texinfo authoring help and discussion (archive).

texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org

To discuss the latest test releases (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

More info

• The official GNU documentation page contains much more information about Texinfo and GNU manuals.
• You can search all GNU documentation (among other interesting things).
• An introductory article written by Arnold Robbins.
• A Tk-based info reader.
• Another curses-based info reader with color support and a lynx-like interface.
• Other Texinfo converters.
• The program texi2roff (for conversion to troff). texi2roff is not maintained and not up to date.
• The help2man program generates good man pages from --help output. This is something Texinfo is unlikely to ever do.
• If you want to convert from Docbook to Texinfo, see http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net.

Contact.