[texhax] LaTeX enhancement

[uws]

På Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 05:04:20PM -0400, david.boerschlein at pb.com skrev:
> We have the TexLive distribution., which appears not to have the source
> code for the latex command.
> 
> We are in need of an enhancement to the LaTeX command-line so that it will
> read a list of tex filenames from either STDIN or disk and, for each
> filename in the list, create a DVI file without forking and execing each
> time. We have 80,000 tex files to process for a typical run to create
> 80,000 dvi files. Alternately, we could give it the name of a directory
> and expect latex to process all the tex files in the directory.

I suggest looking at the "rubber" package, available at [1] or from your
favourite Linux distribution. Rubber is a collection of python [2] scripts for
LaTeX compiling, and among them is rubber-pipe, which reads a .tex file from
STDIN and returns a compiled file in either dvi, postscript of pdf format at
STDOUT. Using standard unix commandline utilities (xargs, cat, pipes, et. al.),
I think you can achieve what you want without the need to code extensions or
enhanced versions of the TeX-related applications using constructs like these:

  for file in filelist.txt; do rubber-pipe < $file > $file.ps; done

However, I don't think you can avoid the fork()/exec(), LaTeX is not a batch
processor I think.

  mvrgr, Wouter

[1] http://rubber.sourceforge.net/
-- 
:wq                                                       mail uws at xs4all.nl

sugar sugar :: you couldn't taste it :: in my throat         -- heather nova
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