[l2h] Re: Installation problems on a PC

[Marek Rouchal]

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Anders Blom wrote:

> I recently installed latex2html 982b7dos (latest sharp PC version?) on
> my Win98 PC, and ran into all sorts of problems. They should be quite
> general, so I would like to bring them to your attention.

Generally speaking, deficiencies in the setup procedure of LaTeX2HTML <
99.1 on other platforms than UNIX are known. Please try 99.1 available
from http://saftsack.fs.uni-bayreuth.de/~latex2ht
I'll be happy about bug reports wrt. to this version. The platform
dependencies have been completely redesigned and should work much better
now. Unfortunately the whole 99.1 release is still in pre-beta stage, a
lot of things have to be straightened out.

> 1) There seems to be confusion between the labels "dos" and "MSWin32" in
> "install-test". I had to manually change them on line 389 in
> "install-test" to get it running. By default it tried to use unix-style
> shell command (`sh and so
> on), but not for MSWin32. But for dos, which was what I had (I never
> changed it myself, it was what I got just from running) it then uses the
> unix-style, which will not work. So, either default should be
> "find_executable" or there should be an "or" to test for MSWin32 OR dos.

Done in 99.1. I'd be happy if someone could test it on DOS.

> 2) The install script fails to update "local.pm" if it exists; it
> just uses the old settings even if you would like to change something.
> Also, there seems to be confusion between "local.pm" and "localdos.pm"
> -- at
> some point the latex2html script tried to use the one which was not
> updated. (Maybe I did things in the wrong order to get this error, but
> it is nevertheless confusing to have both files present, not knowing
> which is valid.)

local.pm and localdos.pm is obsolete in 99.1. Should work the way it is
implemented now on Unix, OS/2, Win32 and DOS. The first three are tested
(Unix: Solaris and Linux).

> 3) Same confusion goes for "l2h-conf" and "latex2html.config"

Obsolete.

> 4) The dvips supplied with some packages, such as MikTeX 1.20 that I
> use, has
> a somewhat different output from "dvips -f DUMMY" which prevents the
> current script from detecting the version number. Output is:
> 
> This is dvips 5.83 (MiKTeX 1.20b) Copyright 1998 Radical Eye Software
> ......
> 
> So even if the version is 5.83, install-test will warn about wrong
> version. Inexperienced users may be frightened.

Interesting. 99.1 should be more robust. I'll check anyway.

> 4) RATHER SEVERE PROBLEM (at least it kept me going for 2 days to locate
> the source of it): The "pnmcrop" supplied elsewhere (such as with
> MikTeX) has a different calling argument list, which will cause ps2img-n
> to fail. If configure-pstoimg happens to find this before the one
> supplied with latex2html, thing go very wrong.

What parameters does pnmcrom accept? I.e. what is the difference? Could
you provide more details? Thanks!

> which I have been trying for a long time now. Further, it should be made
> public that not all versions of pnmcrop are interchangeable.

99.1 does a test on pnmcrop. This should help to determine what type it
is. However, more tests might be necessary.

> I should also add, that to get GNU Make 3.77 (latest) to generate the
> html-version of the manual is basically hopeless on a PC. You have to
> apply all sorts of tricks to the Makefile, and it still stoppes halfway.
> I seems there is trouble with semicolons at the end of lines, and also
> on a PC the command to invoke l2h must be "perl latex2html". If you
> then, as I liked to do, use a .bat-file to do this, so that you still
> can call it with just "latex2html *.tex", WinDOS will strip off any
> commas on the command line, so "-html_version 3.2,math" comes out
> "-html_version 3.2 math", and so l2h tries to work on "math.tex".

Well, that's a general problem. I tried to make 99.1 as little Unixish as
possible, but did not touch the manual generation yet. It should be
possible to generate the manual manually ;-) without the Makefile quite
easily. I'll check...

Thanks for your hints!

Cheers,

Marek

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