Re: [NTG-pdftex] cmd line arguments

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

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"Hans" == Hans Hagen writes:

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so, although your proposal is ok from the prespective of portability, it's not needed from the perspective of windows

Yes, but it is a bit annoying that you have to download and install all the software under windows which is part of any Linux distribution.

sure but installation of perl (ruby. puthon) is trivial under windows (btw, i alway send up installing programs like unzip and wget etc which are not part of standard suse linux installations, so there's always something left to install -)

At work I installed cygwin for this reason. I'm really tired from downloading/installing all the tools I need. It would be ok if Perl gets installed by the TeXLive installer.

ah, cygwin ... i never use that (i only copied the ssh -related- things to a special path); nowadays most tools are available as native windows binaries

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concerning portability ... in principle all those shell scripts that now need to be provided as c program of perl script on windows qualify for some kind of luafying (we can even consider putting lua itself in the bin distributions; it's small)

Maybe. But I think that as a replacement for shell scripts, Perl/Tk is a better choice (with emphasis on Tk).

sure, but in that case shipping the lua interpreter as part of the tex binaries makes sense (it's small);

But then we need a Perl which is aware of kpathsea so that the module path can be set in texnf.cnf. I doubt that anyone wants to maintain it.

i wrote a kpse class in ruby so doing it in lua is probably a matter of translation ... we'll see

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(context ships with a ruby ps->pdf script and converting that would take quite some lua code -)

Will look into your ruby file when I have more time. It seems that not everybody is satisfied with epstopdf...

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i can imagine that we provide access to the raw commandline (i assume that this info is available somewhere)

Yes, but it would be good if we could convince tex (the program) not to complain so loudly if there is an option it doesn't know.

sure; the problem is -as always- in compatibility but i think that we should not be too afraid to change those interface aspects and i always wondered why tex complained about that - it does not hurt to ignore unknown options (well, we can always make complaining an option itself, configurable in the cnf file, off by default) Hans