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This chapter describes how to run miftran.
In order to run miftran, you will need two things (other than miftran itself):
You makeyour MIF file from Frame using the Save As command. You create your rc file using your favorite text editor.
Miftran is designed to accept a single MIF file as input, but it can produce multiple output files. Thus you can create a separate output file for each chapter of your document (or each section, or whatever else you select). This is appropriate for hypertext browsers, where each chunk is typically considerably smaller than what goes into a MIF file (such as this entire document).
The simplest way to use miftran is to create a directory in which to produce the output files, and to place your rc file into that directory. You can put a simple makefile into the directory so that you don't have to remember how to run miftran; then you can simply cd into that directory and type `make' in order to update your HTML files.
Miftran includes only a few command line options, mainly for debugging. The debugging command line options (-cmd, -fmt, -lex, -sub, -tran) allow you to control which phases of the translation are performed by miftran (see Section 1.1, `The Translation Process' on page 2 ). Other options are:
An additional argument not starting with `-' is assumed to bean input filename. A single `-' specifies that input is to come from stdin. Input will also be taken from stdin if no input file is specified (either on the command line or in the rc file).
There are no command line options to specify output files. The output file or files are nor mally specified in the rc file (see Chapter 3, `The RC File' on page 6 ), and are processed during the fmt stage of the translation (see Section 1.1, `The Translation Process' on page 2 ). Thus if you use one of the debugging command line options to get early output, it will always come to stdout.
Miftran uses the following
environment variables:
Miftran makes a single pass through the document and produces one or more output files.
In order to properly handle forward cross references, a second pass of some sort needs to
be made. This is handled by an external script, called fixref, which uses a data file pro
duced by miftran in order to update the cross references in the HTML files. Control over
production of the data file is contained in the miftran rc file.
The fixref script is normally included as part of the make procedure as defined in the
Makefile for the HTML documents.
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2.4 Postprocessing