Re: [help-texinfo] texi2html trouble

[Patrice Dumas]

Which version of texi2html are you using?


On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 06:09:19PM +0100, Andreas Falkenhahn wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Thus, I'm running texi2html like this:
> 
> texi2html -frames -split node foo.texi

That looks possibly correct, however, keep in mind that texi2html, by
default, uses sectioning commands, and not nodes to delimitate the
elements output.  If you want nodes to be used, from the top of my
head, you could do something along

texi2html --set-init-variable USE_NODES=1

> The result is gazillions of these warnings:
> 
> ** fooNode doesn't appear in menus
> ** `fooChapter' is up for fooNode', but has no menu entry for this node
> 
> I have the feeling that I'm getting these two warnings for every node in my 
> document.
> But why? How to fix that? There are zero warnings when running texi2pdf on 
> this
> document... and it's over 700 pages! Why does texi2html suddenly begin to 
> lament
> about it when texi2pdf deals with it just fine?

Those warnings are about the menu structure of the document which is
incorrect.  If you want to have the menu structure ignored (as what
texi2pdf does), you can pass

texi2html --set-init-variable SHOW_MENU=0

Otherwise you'll have to do @menu as explained in the texinfo manual.

> Nevertheless, the conversion to HTML somewhat works and 800 single HTML
> files are written to the current directory, including a foo_frame.html entry 
> point.
> However, when I select a chapter now in the left frame (e.g. Chapter 1), the
> sections of that very chapter are NOT shown! The HTML page that is displayed
> in the right frame when I click on a chapter in the left frame is simply a 
> dummy
> HTML that doesn't contain anything more than the heading of the chapter! The
> chapter's section aren't listed on this page which looks very confusing!

That's simply because the @chapter element correspond to the text
between the @chapter (and maybe the previous @node) and the next
sectioning command.  My guess is that it is more or less empty in
your document (in the classical case, there should be a @menu).

> So could anyone help me to get this working correctly? I've read through the
> documentation a bit and it seems that a lot can be achieved with these init
> files, but honestly, that looks far too complex for my purposes! I think what 
> I
> want should be quite trivial: texi2html should just give me a two-framed HTML
> with the TOC on the left and the contents on the right. I hope this can be 
> achieved
> without having to write a customized init file first...

No need to write an init file for your case.  If you don't want to
bother with @menu, you could try to use book.init and see if it 
suits you need as it should add automatically directions for
sections below (and up).

> What is even more strange is that the CHM target works perfectly and 
> absolutely
> none of the warnings cited above appear!! When I use chm.init as the init
> file, texi2html creates a complete, ready to use HTML Help project. That was
> surely very convenient! I'd just wish that it could also give me a nice 
> two-framed
> HTML version of my texi doc this easily...

The base for the html part of the chm output is the same as what 
you do (with indeed SHOW_MENU=0), but the whole structure is done
using chm specific files.

-- 
Pat