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.
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Documenting Python |  |
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Release 2.4.4c1, documentation updated on 11 October 2006.