Re: [Offtopic] Re: [MacPerl] Scripting Photoshop

[Arved Sandstrom <Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Chris Nandor wrote:

> At 15.25 -0500 1999.02.05, Scott Pulver wrote:
> >Perl.  At this point the only thing that I miss, is easy use of the glue
> >tables in Frontier that allow for easy IAC (especially to FMPro).  I am
> >planning on looking into Chris's FMPro glue for Perl here shortly.
> 
> I hope to get back into Mac::Glue development within the next couple of weeks.

I hope so. The MacCPAN stuff is really useful, but (and this is no news)
it's just automation of procedures. The Mac::Glue project OTOH, at least
as I see it, makes it actually *possible* for me to do things on the Mac I
couldn't do before (because I am _not_ going to learn Applescript).

I used it back in November, actually. I thought it would be neat to have a
pod2pdf tool, so I wrote a wrapper droplet for pod2latex which uses
Mac::Glue::pdftex. Specifically, it controls pdftex through the 'exec'
Apple Event, by which you can pass a Unix TeX command line. pod2latex
doesn't produce a complete LaTeX document, so the wrapper script adds the
necessaries, and also puts in options for the 'hyperref' package.

I wouldn't use this approach for an arbitrary LaTeX doc, because unless
you're a TeX god you're going to be editing the thing, but for most POD
pod2latex churns out good LaTeX, so automating the rest makes sense.

I took it so far as to have a pod2pdf MacPerl droplet which you drag the
pod file onto, and it chugs away, and out the other end comes a PDF doc
with proper Finder Info, with a Table of Contents all linked up and
bookmarks to same. And Document Info.

If there's some interest in this I could post it, after I refine it a bit.
In particular, anyone would be able to do a lot more with the final PDF
just by specifying more options to 'hyperref', and also post-processing
the pod2latex output more than I do at present.

For me this was more proof of concept, because I'm not a fan of PDF, but
it's neat nonetheless.

Arved



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