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<span id="History"></span><div class="header">
<p>
Previous: <a href="Adding-Output-Formats.html" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Adding Output Formats</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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<hr>
<span id="History-1"></span><h3 class="section">1.6 History</h3>
<span id="index-Stallman_002c-Richard-M_002e"></span>
<span id="index-Chassell_002c-Robert-J_002e"></span>
<span id="index-Fox_002c-Brian"></span>
<span id="index-Berry_002c-Karl"></span>
<p>Richard M. Stallman invented the Texinfo format, wrote the initial
processors, and created Edition 1.0 of this manual. Robert J.
Chassell greatly revised and extended the manual, starting with
Edition 1.1. Brian Fox was responsible for the standalone Texinfo
distribution until version 3.8, and originally wrote the standalone
<code>makeinfo</code> and <code>info</code> programs. Karl Berry has
continued maintenance since Texinfo 3.8 (manual edition 2.22).
</p>
<span id="index-Pinard_002c-Francois"></span>
<span id="index-Schwab_002c-Andreas"></span>
<span id="index-Weinberg_002c-Zack"></span>
<span id="index-Weisshaus_002c-Melissa"></span>
<span id="index-Zaretskii_002c-Eli"></span>
<span id="index-Zuhn_002c-David-D_002e"></span>
<p>Our thanks go out to all who helped improve this work, particularly
the indefatigable Eli Zaretskii and Andreas Schwab, who have provided
patches beyond counting. François Pinard and David D. Zuhn,
tirelessly recorded and reported mistakes and obscurities. Zack
Weinberg did the impossible by implementing the macro syntax in
<samp>texinfo.tex</samp>. Thanks to Melissa Weisshaus for her frequent
reviews of nearly similar editions. Dozens of others have contributed
patches and suggestions, they are gratefully acknowledged in the
<samp>ChangeLog</samp> file. Our mistakes are our own.
</p>
<span id="index-History-of-Texinfo"></span>
<span id="index-Texinfo-history"></span>
<span id="Beginnings"></span><h4 class="subheading">Beginnings</h4>
<span id="index-Scribe"></span>
<span id="index-Reid_002c-Brian"></span>
<p>In the 1970’s at CMU, Brian Reid developed a program and format named
Scribe to mark up documents for printing. It used the <code>@</code>
character to introduce commands, as Texinfo does. Much more
consequentially, it strove to describe document contents rather than
formatting, an idea wholeheartedly adopted by Texinfo.
</p>
<span id="index-Bolio"></span>
<span id="index-BoTeX"></span>
<p>Meanwhile, people at MIT developed another, not too dissimilar format
called Bolio. This then was converted to using TeX as its typesetting
language: BoTeX. The earliest BoTeX version seems to have been
0.02 on October 31, 1984.
</p>
<p>BoTeX could only be used as a markup language for documents to be
printed, not for online documents. Richard Stallman (RMS) worked on
both Bolio and BoTeX. He also developed a nifty on-line help format
called Info, and then combined BoTeX and Info to create Texinfo, a
mark up language for text that is intended to be read both online and
as printed hard copy.
</p>
<p>Moving forward, the original translator to create Info was written
(primarily by RMS and Bob Chassell) in Emacs Lisp, namely the
<code>texinfo-format-buffer</code> and other functions. In the early 1990s,
Brian Fox reimplemented the conversion program in C, now called
<code>makeinfo</code>.
</p>
<span id="Reimplementing-in-Perl"></span><h4 class="subheading">Reimplementing in Perl</h4>
<span id="index-Cons_002c-Lionel"></span>
<span id="index-Dumas_002c-Patrice"></span>
<p>In 2012, the C <code>makeinfo</code> was itself replaced by a Perl
implementation generically called <code>texi2any</code>. This version
supports the same level of output customization as
<code>texi2html</code>, an independent program originally written by
Lionel Cons, later with substantial work by many others. The many
additional features needed to make <code>texi2html</code> a replacement
for <code>makeinfo</code> were implemented by Patrice Dumas. The first
never-released version of <code>texi2any</code> was based on the
<code>texi2html</code> code. That implementation, however, was abandoned
in favor of the current program, which parses the Texinfo input into a
tree for processing. It still supports nearly all the features of
<code>texi2html</code>.
</p>
<p>The new Perl program is much slower than the old C program. We hope
the speed gap will close in the future, but it may not ever be
entirely comparable. So why did we switch? In short, we intend and
hope that the present program will be much easier than the previous C
implementation of <code>makeinfo</code> to extend to different output
styles, back-end output formats, and all other customizations.
In more detail:
</p>
<ul>
<li> HTML customization. Many GNU and other free software packages
had been happily using the HTML customization features in
<code>texi2html</code> for years. Thus, in effect two independent
implementations of the Texinfo language had developed, and keeping
them in sync was not simple. Adding the HTML customization possible
in <code>texi2html</code> to a C program would have been an
enormous effort.
</li><li> Unicode, and multilingual support generally, especially of east
Asian languages. Although of course it’s perfectly plausible to write
such support in C, in the particular case of <code>makeinfo</code>, it
would have been tantamount to rewriting the entire program. In Perl,
much of that comes essentially for free.
</li><li> Additional back-ends. The <code>makeinfo</code> code had become
convoluted to the point where adding a new back-end was quite complex,
requiring complex interactions with existing back-ends. In contrast,
our Perl implementation provides a clean tree-based representation for
all back-ends to work from. People have requested numerous different
back-ends (LaTeX, the latest (X)HTML, …), and they will now
be much more feasible to implement. Which leads to the last item:
</li><li> Making contributions easier. In general, due to the cleaner
structure, the Perl program should be considerably easier than the C
for anyone to read and contribute to, with the resulting obvious
benefits.
</li></ul>
<p>See <a href="Reference-Implementation.html">Reference Implementation</a>, for more on the rationale for and
role of <code>texi2any</code>.
</p>
<hr>
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<p>
Previous: <a href="Adding-Output-Formats.html" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Adding Output Formats</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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