7.3 Working on Cygwin

Installing the required tools under Cygwin under Cygwin can be a little tedious, if only because many packages are more difficult to install under Cygwin.

Using the Cygwin installer, make sure your Cygwin installation includes Perl, Python, and the TEX packages. Perl and Python are located under Interpreters in the installer. The TEX packages are located in the Text section; installing the tetex-beta, texmf, texmf-base, and texmf-extra ensures that all the required packages are available. (There may be a more minimal set, but I've not spent time trying to minimize the installation.)

The netpbm package is used by L^ATEX2HTML, and must be installed before L^ATEX2HTML can be successfully installed, even though they will never be used for most Python documentation. References to download locations are located in the netpbm README. Install according to the instructions.

L^ATEX2HTML can be installed from the source archive, but only after munging one of the files in the distribution. Edit the file L2hos.pm in the top level of the unpacked distribution; near the bottom of the file, change the text $^O with the text 'unix'. Proceed using this command to build and install the software:

% ./configure && make install

You should now be able to build at least the HTML, PDF, and PostScript versions of the formatted documentation.

See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.