INSTALL

INSTALL file for texinfo.

     Copyright 1992-2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

     Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
     are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
     notice and this notice are preserved.

For generic installation instructions on compiling and installing this
Automake-based distribution, please read the file `INSTALL.generic'.

Installation notes specific to Texinfo:

* texinfo.tex and the other *.tex files are not installed by
  `make install', because TeX installations vary so widely.
  Installing them in the wrong place would give a false sense of
  security.   Instead, you have to run an additional make command
  after the normal make install:

    make TEXMF=/your/texmf install-tex

  where TEXMF is a root of a TeX hierachy that follows the TeX
  Directory Structure standard (http://tug.org/tds/).
  texinfo.tex is installed in ${TEXMF}/tex/texinfo, epsf.tex
  in ${TEXMF}/tex/generic/epsf/, etc.

  (Alternatively, you can simply cp *.tex to the appropriate places.)

  For information on how or where to install files, see your TeX
  documentation in general (i.e. web2c and kpathsea manuals), and the
  texmf.cnf file.

  It is possible to put these .tex files in a `local' place instead of
  overwriting existing ones.  You might find where this is by running
  `kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFLOCAL'.

  If you add files to your TeX installations, not just replace existing
  ones, you very likely will also have to update your ls-R file; do this
  by running the mktexlsr command.

  An alternative is to copy texinfo.tex to the same directory as your
  Texinfo manual, but this is not especially recommended.

  You can get the latest texinfo.tex from
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo.tex (and all GNU mirrors)
  ftp://tug.org/tex/texinfo.tex (and all CTAN mirrors)
  or from the gnulib project on Savannah (among other places).
  If you have problems with the texinfo.tex in this distribution, please
  check for a newer version.

* If you're maintaining a TeX distribution and keeping the files up to
  date yourself, you may not want to see the installation warnings.

  For that, run configure --disable-install-warnings, or set
  enable_install_warnings=no in the environment.

* `texi2any' depends on having a locale installed that is not "C", "C.UTF-8"
   or "POSIX" in order to translate strings in its output, if @documentlanguage
   appears in a document.  This is due to a limitation in the libc
   "gettext" interface.

* The texi2any program can use extension (XS) modules.  The configure
  script will attempt to detect whether such modules can be built and
  loaded on your installation.  If you want to disable the use of XS modules,
  you can give the --disable-perl-xs flag to `configure'; likewise, to use
  them without checking, give the --enable-perl-xs flag.

* When `configure' is running in the tta/ subdirectory and XS modules
  are used, instead of the standard CC, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS etc., it uses special
  variables with a PERL_EXT_ prefix.  These are all listed in the output of
  `configure --help'.  This is necessary because it is possible that the C
  compiler being used to compile Perl extension modules and other texi2any C
  codes is a different compiler to that used for the rest of the package.
  (However, if you need to override these variables when running `make', use
  the unprefixed variants, e.g. CFLAGS instead of PERL_EXT_CFLAGS.  Exception:
  you cannot override CPPFLAGS this way, as gnulib uses this variable.)

  We recommend not using the configure --config-cache nor setting --cache-file
  because of the differences between the main directory and texi2any
  settings.  The features found in the main directory may be different from
  the features available in texi2any.  Using cached values could bring in
  values found for the main directory that are not correct in the context of
  texi2any.

* After building the program, you can control the use of XS modules by
  the Perl texi2any implementation with the `TEXINFO_XS' environment
  variable, which may be useful for troubleshooting.
  Set TEXINFO_XS=omit to disable the use of XS modules, or
  TEXINFO_XS=debug to print some information as the modules are
  looked for and loaded.

* Native code (in XS modules) get translations for strings to be put in
  output files using libc gettext, using the LANGUAGE variable.  If the
  gettext implementation (such as that in musl libc) does not support
  this variable, this will not work and strings will not be translated.
  However, if you pass the --enable-xs-perl-libintl flag to `configure',
  an alternative translation method is activated where C code calls back
  into the Perl interpreter to get translations, which does work.

* The Info tree uses a file `dir' as its root node; the `dir-example'
  file in this distribution is included as a possible starting point.
  Use it, modify it, or ignore it just as you like.

* You can create a file texinfo.cnf to be read by TeX when
  processing Texinfo manuals.  For example, you might like to use
  @afourpaper by default.  See the `Preparing for TeX' node in
  the Texinfo manual for more details.  You don't have to create the
  file if you have nothing to put in it.

* Texinfo uses code from the Gnulib portability library.  For correct
  localization of Gnulib strings, you may need to install a 'gnulib-l10n'
  package.
  + Documentation:
    https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Localization.html
  + Download:
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnulib/gnulib-l10n-*