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7.3 Working on Cygwin

Installing the required tools under Cygwin under Cygwin can be a little tedious. Most of the required packages can be installed using Cygwin's graphical installer, while netpbm and LaTeX2HTML must be installed from source.

Start with a reasonably modern version of Cygwin. If you haven't upgraded for a few years, now would be a good time.

Using the Cygwin installer, make sure your Cygwin installation includes Perl, Python, and the TeX packages. Perl and Python are located under the Interpreters heading. The TeX packages are located under the Text heading, and are named `tetex-*`. To ensure that all required packages are available, install every `tetex` package, except `tetex-x11`. (There may be a more minimal set, but I've not spent time trying to minimize the installation.)

The netpbm package is used by LaTeX2HTML, and must be installed before LaTeX2HTML can be successfully installed, even though its features will not be used for most Python documentation. References to download locations are located in the netpbm README. Install from the latest stable source distribution according to the instructions. (Note that binary packages of netpbm are sometimes available, but these may not work correctly with LaTeX2HTML.)

LaTeX2HTML can be installed from the source archive, but only after munging one of the files in the distribution. Download the source archive from the LaTeX2HTML website http://www.latex2html.org/ (or one of the many alternate sites) and unpack it to a build directory. In the top level of this build directory there will be a file named L2hos.pm. Open L2hos.pm in an editor, and near the bottom of the file replace 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 DVI, HTML, PDF, and PostScript versions of the formatted documentation.