[OS X TeX] Converting Fink info files to pdf using texi2pdf

[Martin Costabel]

Gérard Degrez wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just installed octave with Fink. I tried to convert the manual 
> (/sw/share/info/octave.info) to pdf using texi2pdf (Gerben Wierda's 
> teTeX distribution), but there are invalid characters in the info file. 
> Is there an incompatibility between the fink .info format and GW's teTeX?

Some confusion here: The octave.info file here is in correct GNU info 
format, generated from the texinfo file using makeinfo. It is made for 
being looked at with the "info" command, not for further processing with 
texi2pdf. For that, you would need the octave.texi file from which 
octave.info was made.

As an aside: "Fink .info format" usually means yet something else, 
namely the format of the Fink package descriptions.

The Fink octave package installs very little of the extensive 
accompanying documentation which comes in various formats, html, ps, pdf 
etc. For the reasons, you would have to ask the package maintainer, 
presumably it is to avoid bloat, and the info documentation and octave 
runtime online help are already rather comprehensive.

If you want the pdf manual, you can do the following:
If you built octave via fink with the -k flag, so that the build 
directory was conserved,

   cd /sw/src/octave-2.1.64-2/octave-2.1.64/doc
   sudo chown -R $USER .
   texi2pdf interpreter/octave.texi

This will produce the pdf manual. You can do the same with the other 
subdirectories of doc to produce various other pdf files.

-- 
Martin




--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>