"Hi all, I'll relate this to you, because it might happen to you...
I use scripts to personalize and compile my eBooks for each order. I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 to Xubuntu 12.10, and one of my books broke. A little investigation showed that it got to .dvi OK, but then things went south. Eventually I narrowed it down to a failure in makeindex. It turns out that now texmf changed so that it defaults to openout_any = p, which precludes running makeindex on an absolute filename. If you look around the net, you'll see people suggesting changing openout_any in texmf.conf, but that's a bad idea for security reasons. Security is the reason they've adopted the new default. I finally found the right way to do it. Just before the call to makeindex, I added these two lines: TEXMFOUTPUT=/absolute/path/to/temp/files export TEXMFOUTPUT In hindsight, an even better way might have been: TEXMFOUTPUT=/absolute/path/to/temp/files makeindex So, if your scripts start breaking and you suspect they're failing on makeindex, and you get an error message saying something about "openout_any is p", try what I did and it just might fix it. SteveT
