3. Installation of texi2html

3.1 Requirements

To install texi2html, you must first obtain a copy of the source distribution. See section Obtaining texi2html.

texi2html requires perl version 5.00405 or above to be run. An older perl 5 version with File::Spec is also likely to work. The current version has been lightly tested on a wide range of perl, but has not been tested extensively on versions of perl below 5.6. To play nice with encodings you also need the Encode and Unicode::Normalize modules.

To rebuild the script perl isn't required in most cases. For more information about advanced build features, see Advanced build features.

3.2 Configuring the source and rebuilding

texi2html is a standard Automake-based distribution. If you have a source version, you should run ./configure to configure the sources and make to build the script.

./configure accepts options to select the installation directory for the ‘texi2html’ file, the default directories texi2html will use to look for configuration files, and other details. Run ./configure --help for more information. Running ./configure creates ‘texi2html_configured.pl’ from ‘texi2html.pl’, and also builds the make configuration files (‘Makefile’s).

Running make combines five files into the final ‘texi2html’ program file:

• ‘texi2html_configured.pl’ contains the base program,
• ‘MySimple.pm’ handles the command line options,
• ‘texi2html.init’ is the default configuration file, and
• ‘T2h_i18n.pm’ is used for internationalization.
• ‘translations.pl’ contains the translations of the strings used in documents.

Running make also rebuilds the documentation if needed.

3.3 Installing

make install performs the installation to the locations specified to the ./configure script. This usually involves placing the actual ‘texi2html’ file someplace in your path, such as ‘/usr/local/bin’ or ‘/usr/bin’.

Installing texi2html in your path should be sufficient to run it. To use default initialization files, or a configuration file for LaTeX2HTML when using latex2html to convert @tex sections (see section Expanding @tex and @math regions using LaTeX2HTML), install them in the package data directory specified to configure. This is ‘/usr/local/share/texi2html/’ by default, but depends on the value of the ‘--pkgdatadir=dir’ option passed to the ./configure script. Files used for strings customization and internationalization are also searched for in the ‘i18n’ directory of this directory. See section Use initialization files for fine tuning for more.

3.4 Advanced build features

This section documents features that are unlikely to be used but deserve a bit of documentation.

A ./configure switch, ‘--with-unicode’ allows to choose whether the unicode code should be used or not. The default is to detect it with a test. This code requires Encode and Unicode::Normalize modules.

A similar ./configure switch, ‘--with-unidecode’ allows to choose whether the perl module Text::Unidecode should be used or not. The default is to detect it with a test. This code requires the Text::Unidecode module.

perl isn't needed to build the script. the script is build by ‘./configure’ and a shell script launched by make which is a simple wrapper around a sed one-liner. The perl command can be specified with the environment variable $PERL, otherwise it is detected. perl is required to rebuild the documentation as the HTML documentation is rebuild with texi2html itself.

The translations are managed by a script manage_i18n.pl, created by ./configure. manage_i18n.pl requires Data::Dumper to function normally. If this module isn't there ./configure detects it and manage_i18n.pl doesn't really rebuild the translations, but only copy files. It is possible to use the ./configure switch ‘--enable-translations’ to override the ./configure detection. For more about translations, see Internationalization.

It is possible to build from outside of the source directory, for example the following should work:

tar xzvf texi2html-1.78.tar.gz
mkdir texi2html_build
cd texi2html_build
../texi2html-1.78/configure && make

All these features enables to build texi2html on a platform in order to run it on another platform, a kind of cross-building. The ./configure switches and $PERL allows to specify everything needed for the build of the texi2html script.

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