B. Incompatibilities with previous versions

texi2html has accumulated a lot of incompatibilities with previous versions. They are documented in the ‘NEWS’ file, we discuss them here nevertheless. most of the incompatibilities were introduced in version 1.68.

• When the manual is split the default is to put resulting files in a directory with name the manual file basename (previously they were left in the current directory). To avoid that, call texi2html with ‘-output .’. This has been changed to be compatible with makeinfo and also because it fits better with the cross manuals reference scheme.
• The option ‘--output’ signification changed. It now has the same meaning than for makeinfo. It seems that in 1.66 it was the same than ‘-out-file’. ‘--output’ new meaning allows to replace ‘-out-file’ and ‘-subdir’ with a unique option.

  More precisely ‘-out-file’ forces the output to be unsplit while ‘--output’ behaves differently when split (it specifies the directory where the manual files should be outputted) and unsplit (it specifies the output file). ‘-subdir’ is retained for backward compatibility.

  If you want a backward compatibility you can use ‘-subdir’ for the output directory if the document is split, and ‘-out-file’ if the document isn't split. This hasn't been tested extensively though.

• Many options has been obsoleted but they are retained for backward compatibility.
• The init files are searched in new directories, however they are still searched for in the old directories for backward compatibility.
• the option ‘--glossary’ doesn't do anything. Likely nothing specific is done regarding bibliographies. This has been decided because this added some semantics to the texinfo formatting language that weren't part of texinfo.

  It should be possible to do something similar with macros. See for example ‘glossary.texi’ for glossary and ‘my-bib-macros.texi’ for bibliography in the directory ‘examples’. In the web2c package there is an example of use of BibTeX, see http://tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Build/source/TeX/texk/web2c/doc/ (the examples for bibliography are taken from the texinfo home page http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/texinfo.html).

• don't use T2H_CENTER_IMAGE. @center should be used insead, it will give the right output for all the formats.
• If a directory creation fails the program aborts. This is much safer.
• The interface for internationalisation changed, although the previous wasn't documented a lot.
• the API described in this manual changed a lot. A important change was to use the Texi2HTML::Config names space instead of variables prefixed with ‘T2H_’ or ‘t2h_’. To cope with the change the prefix should be removed from variables in init files. Some variables are now in %Texi2HTML::THISDOC.
• API changes between 1.76 and 1.78:
  • paragraph has new arguments with indentation information, added as the third argument, and other context information. The formatting linked with commands opened before the paragraph and closed after the paragraph are done in the formatting function. Similar things are done for preformatted.
  • normal_text changed completely. There are much more arguments to give informations about the context, and normal_text now does more text manipulation.
  • New arguments for image the alt text, the height and width, the path to working dir and the path to image file relative to working dir. More image formatting is done in the formatting function.
  • New argument for empty_line.
  • End of line removal is done in formatting function of definition line formatting.
  • node_file_name now should only returns the node file, since the redirection file isn't used anymore. element_file_name only is used for file names, whatever NODES_FILES is.
• @ifinfo regions are not expanded by default. This may lead to warnings or errors especially if the Top node is enclosed in @ifinfo, as some node won't appear in menus. The quick fix is to call texi2html with the option ‘--ifinfo’ and the right way should be to make more use of @ifnottex.
• The code appearing before the first node is now outputted, it was ignored before. ‘--ignore-preamble-text’ revert to the previous behaviour. Enclosing in @ifnothtml would be much cleaner.

This document was generated by Derek Price on June, 5 2007 using texi2html 1.78.