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<span id="Adding-Output-Formats"></span><div class="header">
<p>
Next: <a href="History.html" accesskey="n" rel="next">History</a>, Previous: <a href="Printed-Books.html" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Printed Books</a>, Up: <a href="Overview.html" accesskey="u" rel="up">Overview</a> [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="Command-and-Variable-Index.html" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p>
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<span id="Adding-Output-Formats-1"></span><h3 class="section">1.5 Adding Output Formats</h3>
<span id="index-Additional-output-formats"></span>
<p>The output formats in the previous sections handle a wide variety of
usage, but of course there is always room for more.
</p>
<span id="index-Output-formats_002c-supporting-more"></span>
<span id="index-SGML_002dtools-output-format"></span>
<p>If you are a programmer and would like to contribute to the GNU
project by implementing additional output formats for Texinfo, that
would be excellent. The way to do this that would be most useful is
to write a new back-end for <code>texi2any</code>, our reference
implementation of a Texinfo parser; it creates a tree representation
of the Texinfo input that you can use for the conversion. The
documentation in the source file
<samp>tp/Texinfo/Convert/Converter.pm</samp> is a good place to start.
See <a href="Generic-Translator-texi2any.html">Generic Translator <code>texi2any</code></a>.
</p>
<p>Another viable approach is use the Texinfo XML output from
<code>texi2any</code> as your input. This XML is an essentially complete
representation of the input, but without the Texinfo syntax and option
peculiarities, as described above.
</p>
<span id="index-Texinfo-parsers_002c-discouraging-more"></span>
<p>If you still cannot resist the temptation of writing a new program
that reads Texinfo source directly, let us give some more caveats:
please do not underestimate the amount of work required. Texinfo is
by no means a simple language to parse correctly, and remains under
development, so you would be committing to an ongoing task. You
are advised to check that the tests of the language that come with
<code>texi2any</code> give correct results with your new program.
</p>
<span id="index-Man-page-output_002c-not-supported"></span>
<p>From time to time, proposals are made to generate traditional Unix man
pages from Texinfo source. However, because man pages have a strict
conventional format, creating a good man page requires a completely
different source from that needed for the typical Texinfo applications
of writing a good user tutorial and/or a good reference manual. This
makes generating man pages incompatible with the Texinfo design
goal of not having to document the same information in different
ways for different output formats. You might as well write the man
page directly.
</p>
<span id="index-help2man"></span>
<span id="index-O_0027Dea_002c-Brendan"></span>
<p>As an alternative way to support man pages, you may find the program
<code>help2man</code> to be useful. It generates a traditional man page
from the ‘<samp>--help</samp>’ output of a program. In fact, the man pages
for the programs in the Texinfo distribution are generated with this.
It is GNU software written by Brendan O’Dea, available from
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/help2man">http://www.gnu.org/software/help2man</a>.
</p>
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