How to maintain program version info with Make?

[Bob Stark]

I am using make in a non-traditional way, to build training courseware 
documents together into Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and then have all of that 
wrapped up into zip files.

I am slowly getting deeper into make, with the goal to automate a 
multi-step courseware build process so that less technical people in my 
office can perform it.  If a few typos are found in some material, it can 
be repaired and new version rebuilt without involving me.

I currently set and track the courseware version number manually. When I go 
to a new version, I run a program that updates the version number and date 
in the footers of all the documents.

I'd like to automate this step, and keep a file in my directory with the 
current version number, either in the contents of the file, or in the 
filename. I need a few operations on this file, something like:

make showversion    # Show current version number and date
make setversion     # Set new version number into tracking file
make setfiledate    # Set filedate of all files to midnight on version date
make setfooters     # Store the version and filedate in document footers

These are just proposed externals, I'll come up with better names as it 
shakes out.

What is a good practice for doing this on a win32 platform? The examples I 
see involve UNIX tools like sed and awk, which I hesitate to have to 
install onto secretaries PCs at work, but if that works for people, I'd do 
it, since I already must install make, pkzipc, and my document manipulation 
programs.

Can someone point me to a good example or two of how this is done in 
practice? An annotated example is worth a thousand words...