Introduction
============

The IETF_ uses a specific format for the standards and other documents it
publishes as RFCs_, and for the draft documents which are produced when
developing documents for publications.  There exists a number of different
tools to facilitate the formatting of drafts and RFCs according to the
existing rules, and this tool, **xml2rfc**, is one of them.  It takes as input
an xml file which contains the text and meta-information about author names
etc., and transforms it into suitably formatted output.  The input xml file
should follow the DTD given in RFC2629_ (or it's `inofficial successor`_).

The current incarnation of **xml2rfc** provides output in the following
formats: Paginated and unpaginated ascii text, html, nroff, and expanded xml.
Only the paginated text format is currently (January 2013) accepable as draft
submissions to the IETF.

.. _IETF: https://www.ietf.org/
.. _RFCs: https://www.rfc-editor.org/
.. _RFC2629: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2629
.. _inofficial successor: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mrose-writing-rfcs

Usage
=====

xml2rfc accepts a single XML document as input and outputs to one or more conversion formats.

**Basic Usage**: ``xml2rfc SOURCE [options] FORMATS...``

Run ``xml2rfc --help`` for a full listing of command-line options.

