[tex-live] shell_escape extension patch
Taco Hoekwater
taco at elvenkind.com
Sat Sep 29 15:33:32 CEST 2007
Hi Ivo,
ivo welch wrote:
>
> of course, if this could be done in tex itself, my solution would be
> stupid. is it?
>
> What do you think? Is this feasible? Useful? For non-TeXies, it
> would be almost equivalent to a broader namespace w/o having to change
> anything in the core latex system.
This is a very, very hard problem to solve in normal tex with macros,
so re-defining \begin{document} and using an external preprocessor like
you proposed may be the only option. And because of the hackishness
of that, I have never attempted to do something along these lines in
the past.
In Omega (Aleph) it should in principle be possible to do this using
input translations but I have no idea how to go about that in practice.
In luatex this could be done by adjusting the line buffer via a lua
callback relatively easily, but luatex is far from production-ready
at the moment.
Right now, the perl road may the most feasible way to do what you want.
> Second question---perltex currently is incredibly slow because it is
> constantly polling for the appearance of files. How feasible would it
> be to improve the signaling mechanism so that it is without penalty
> when there is no perl in the code? (perhaps this is unimportant
> because luatex may fill much of perltex's need.)
I assume perltex could use a pipe to read from the perl command, using
something like \immediate\openin\perlread="|perl \jobname.pl". That
would make the feedback process quite a bit simpler (and faster). But
that would require quite a few changes to perltex, and the best person
to talk about that is the perltex author.
Best wishes,
Taco
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