[NTG-pdftex] cmd line arguments

[Hans Hagen]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>>"Hans" == Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>
>  > 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

>  > 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

>  > (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...
>
>  > 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