Installing lpdoc

Other software packages required (lpdoc)

The most basic functionality of lpdoc (generating manuals in .texi format, short manual entries in .manl format, generating index files) is essentially self contained. However, using the full capabilities of lpdoc requires having several other software packages installed in the system. Fortunately, all of these packages are public domain software and they will normally be already installed in, e.g., a standard Linux distribution. It should be relatively easy to get and install the required packages in other Unix-like packages or even in Windows, under the Cygwin environment.

• Generating .dvi files: lpdoc normally generates .texi files (actually, a number of .texic files). From the .texi files, .dvi files are generated using the standard tex package directly. The .dvi files can also be generated with the GNU Texinfo package, which provides, among others, the texi2dvi command. However, Texinfo itself requires the standard tex document processing package.

  Generating the .dvi file requires that the texinfo.tex file (containing the relevant macros) be available to tex. This file is normally included with modern tex distributions, although it may be obsolete. An appropriate and up-to-date one for lpdoc is provided with the lpdoc distribution, stored in the lpdoc library during installation, and used automatically when lpdoc runs tex. The texindex package is required in order to process the indices. If you use references in your manual, then the bibtex package is also needed. texindex and bibtex are included with most tex distributions.

• Generating .ps files: .ps files are generated from the .dvi files using the dvips command (this, again, can be changed in the Makefile.skel file in the lib directory). This command is included with standard tex distributions.

• Generating .pdf files: .pdf files are currently generated from the .texi file using the pdftex command (this, again, can be changed in the Makefile.skel file in the lib directory). This command is included in current Linux distributions.

• Generating .info files: .info files are also generated directly from the .texi file using the makeinfo command (this, again, can be changed in the Makefile.skel file in the lib directory). This command is included in the Texinfo distribution. Resolving the link references in the .texi file is also required as above.

• Generating .html files: .html files are generated directly from the HTML lpdoc backend.

• If pictures are used in the manual, the command convert (ImageMagick) is required in order to convert figures from several common graphical formats.