[Doc-SIG] Problem with mkhowto

[Mark Sapiro]

I am one of the developers on the Mailman project. I am trying to make
some minor edits to some of our documentation which is maintained as
.tex files and then converted to PostScript, PDF, HTML, etc. with
mkhowto.

I am working under Cygwin/Windows, and I have the following Cygwin
packages installed

perl 5.8.7-5
python 2.4.3-1
tetex 3.0.0-3
netpbm 10.30-1

I have also installed latex2html 2002-2-1 (1.71) per
<http://docs.python.org/doc/cygwin.html>, and it appears to work just
fine if run standalone.

I have downloaded the source for Python 2.4.0 and am trying to run the
makehowto script. I can successfully run

mkhowto -pdf sometexfile.tex

but if I try to produce any other output format, either with or without
-pdf in the same run, I always encounter the error


pdfTeX error (ext1): \pdfinfo used while \pdfoutput is not set.
<argument> { \def \\{, } \pdfinfo
                                  { /Author (\@author ) /Title (\@title
) } }
l.12 \maketitle

No pages of output.


I tried running 'make' in the distribution Python-2.4/Doc/ directory,
and I get the same error there too. The offending \def appears to be
in Python-2.4/Doc/texinputs/howto.cls.

My questions are am I doing something wrong or have I failed to do a
necessary step? Can these tools be run on Cygwin at all? Do I need a
different (older/newer) version of something?

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan