[texhax] perl for TeX presentations (was: LaTeX users mailing list)

Shawn Wilson ag4ve.us at gmail.com
Sat Sep 14 01:24:10 CEST 2013



Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>   On 9/11/2013 4:20 AM, Shawn Wilson wrote:
>   >
>   > Some users like mailing lists, some like irc, some like the web.
>   > I find its a culture thing. If I need perl help, I'll get on
>   > IRC. If I want Unix help, I'll use a mailing list. Apparently we
>   > don't have a mac.info archive for this list (maybe that should
>   > be done).
>   >
>   > I think there's also a user acceptance part to this. Not many
>   > people use tex. Everyone I know that does layout stuff used xml
>   > (docbook and such). My cousin did his EE thesis in word (no idea
>   > how). At $work we have perl scripts that generate documents
>   > (don't ask - I didn't do it).
>
>   I do it -- for presentations!  A bit more info is provided below.
>
>   > I only started using tex because I am finding the need to do
>   > presentations and refuse to use anything I can't track in source
>   > control (and I *hate* xml).
>
>   I write my presentations in perl -- when I execute the resulting
>   perl script, it writes out a plain TeX file and applies pdfTeX on
>   that plain TeX file to provide me the desired pdf presentation.
>   The pdf presentation can be fairly complex (with transitions,
>   embedded movies, right-click resulting in a drop-down menu of the
>   table of contents etc.) The perl script can also generate a plain
>   text file that can be printed to form the hand-out -- I prefer
>   such a hand-out to printing the pdf presentation as hand-out.
>

That's interresting, I was looking at context for this /type/ of thing (obviously different but taken to the same place). I now see PerlTex does the same thing but it looks uglier due to needing to escape more - maybe there's a way of including a perl module and defining macros for all exported functions or something to get around inner-language issues. Latex::Driver also looks cool but more in a "nice hammer, now I need to find a nail for it" (though there's always masturbation with code). 

Thanks for getting me to look in this space. There might be fun to be had here :) 


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