Re: How to avoid a "basic" single quote being replaced by a "curvy" one?

[Karl Berry]

      TEXI2PDF manual.pdf
    /home/me/bin/texi2dvi: pdfetex exited with bad status, quitting.

Well, that's clearly insufficient information to know what the problem
is.  It's too bad that automake helpfully omits all the output
from TeX.  Maybe if you run  make V=1   and/or texi2pdf by hand, you
will be able to see the actual error message(s).

As a stab in the dark (especially based on your texi2dvi version), maybe
it is just that your texinfo.tex is too old.  You could try getting the
current version from http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/texinfo/texinfo.tex.

Best,
Karl