Re: [MacPerl] Perl Reference Guide

[ajf@afco.demon.co.uk (Alan Fry)]

Jeff Clites writes Tue, 21 Jul 1998 00:13:22 -0700:

>Have any MacPerl-ers found a way to print the Perl Reference Guide, from
>
>     http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvromans/perlref.html
>
>It's a free PostScript version of the tiny O'Reilly book "The Perl 5
>Desktop Guide". The irksome thing is that you need "make" to create the
>actual PS file (so that it can be formatted for different paper sizes), so
>I'm out of luck (the two Unix systems I have access to are running, gasp,
>Perl 4 and can't run the Perl script that make needs to call). I was
>wondering if anyone had converted it to pdf, or at least "made" the file
>for US paper? Or is there another Mac-accessible solution?
>
>(I think we have reached the height of complexity when you need compiler
>tools to print something out.)

One of the virtues of PostScript is the ease with which documents can be
repaged and reordered two-up, four-up and so forth. So it is not
unreaonable IMHO to have a script to take care of such matters.

In the case of prelref, "parr.pl" does this job. If "parr.dp" is saved as a
droplet "baseref.ps" can be processed and the derived PostScript file sent
to STDOUT. Options such as "US letter page size", "even pages", "odd
pages", "book order" and so forth can be set by hand in app_options() in
"parr.pl/dp".

Output to STDOUT fails on a Mac (the file is over 32K) and it is necessary
to redirect STDOUT to a file. The file can be sent to the PS printer in the
usual way or converted to a PDF file with "Distiller". It works very well
either way.

Really there needs to be a Macified version of "parr.pl" to do what
MakeFile does. I might ask Johan Vromans what he thinks about the idea.

Alan Fry



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