GNU Texinfo is an open source and 100% free software project designed from the ground up to act as the official documentation format of the GNU project. It was invented by Bob Chassell and Richard Stallman many years ago, and inspired by Brian Reid’s Scribe formatting language, among other formatting languages that were popular at the point in time.
Can produce printed and online documentation
The software uses a single source file to produce output in a number of formats, both printed and online in various file formats, including HTML (HyperText Markup Language), PDF (Portable Document Format), XML (Extensible Markup Language), DVI (Digital Visual Interface), INFO, and many others.
It is used by many non-GNU projects
The GNU Texinfo system is very well integrated with the GNU Emacs application and it is used by many non-GNU projects as well. The software is distributed across all known GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as on several UNIX-like variants, such as BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).
Consists of various command-line tools
The GNU Texinfo package consists of various command-line tools, among which we can mention detexinfo, pdftexi2dvi for converting .pdf and .texi files to .dvi, texi2dvi for converting .texi files to .dvi, texi2html for converting .texi files to .html, texi2pdf for converting .texi files to .pdf, texindex, and txixml2texi for convertign .xml files to .texi.
Getting started with GNU Texinfo
To install the GNU Texinfo software on your GNU/Linux operating system, download the latest release from either Softpedia or its website, save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it, and open a Terminal app.
In the terminal emulator window, go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/texinfo-5.2), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, which can be installed by running the ‘sudo make install’ command.
