20.9 texi2html: Ancestor of texi2any

Conceptually, the texi2html program is the parent of today’s texi2any program. texi2html was developed independently, originally by Lionel Cons in 1998; at the time, makeinfo could not generate HTML. Many other people contributed to texi2html over the years.

The present texi2any uses little of the actual code of texi2html, and has quite a different basic approach to the implementation (namely, parsing the Texinfo document into a tree), but still, there is a family resemblance.

By design, texi2any supports nearly all the features of texi2html in some way. However, we did not attempt to maintain strict compatibility, so no texi2html executable is installed by the Texinfo package. An approximation can be run with an invocation like this (available as util/texi2html in the Texinfo source):

texi2any --set-customization-variable TEXI2HTML=1 ...

but, to emphasize, this is not a drop-in replacement for the previous texi2html. Here are the biggest differences:

• Most blatantly, the command line options of texi2html are now customization variables, for the most part. A table of approximate equivalents is given below.
• The program-level customization API is very different in texi2any.
• Indices cannot be split.
• Translated strings cannot be customized; we hope to introduce this feature in texi2any in the future.

Aside from the last, we do not intend to reimplement these differences. Therefore, the route forward for authors is alter manuals and build processes as necessary to use the new features and methods of texi2any. The texi2html maintainers (one of whom is the principal author of texi2any) do not intend to make further releases.

Here is the table showing texi2html options and corresponding texi2any customization variables.

Finally, any texi2html users seeking more detailed information can check the draft file doc/texi2oldapi.texi in the Texinfo source repository. It consists mainly of very rough notes, but may still be useful to some.