RE: How to Build a Typesetter

["Pursel, Frank" <frank_pursel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jack,

I liked your use of perl to automate a document transfer between OS's.
Would you share your perl scripts with me?

Thanks,
Frank

> ----------
> From: 	Jack Fitzpatrick[SMTP:jfitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 	Tuesday, November 03, 1998 8:30 PM
> To: 	DSSSL List
> Subject: 	How to Build a Typesetter
> 
> Though the discussions on this list primarily center around arcane DSSSL
> issues, my main problem has been simply figuring out how to actually batch
> process my documents on Unix.  I'm sure that there are other folks out
> there
> like me who generate their *ML documents on Unix and need a way to produce
> multiple page description formats, yet are frustrated by the inadequacy of
> available tools.  I'll give a brief explanation of how I finally solved
> the
> problem after many trials and tribulations.  If anyone is interested in
> learning more, please contact me directly at the E-mail address below.
> 
> My problem was, though I could run Jade on Unix, I couldn't find any Unix
> software that would process my document faithfully into a page description
> language.  Finally, I decided to "cheat" and just figure out a way to pass
> the document to Jade and MS Word on Windows from the Unix command line.
> 
> I'm learning Perl and just discovered that it does OLE, so I first copied
> a
> very simple client-server pair of Perl scripts out of a book (duh).  The
> client resides on Unix and the server on Win95 (NT would obviously be
> better).  The Windows server (single-threaded for the time being) creates
> a
> Word object using OLE and blocks on a socket. The Unix client takes either
> a
> filename or STDIN, and writes the document to the socket.  The server
> reads
> the socket, writes the document to a local file, and then runs Jade on it
> with the appropriate parameters.  The resulting RTF file is then loaded
> into
> Word by the server, and printed to a file (all using OLE from Perl).  The
> output file is returned to the client over the socket, and finally written
> to STDOUT on the Unix machine.  Thus, the client looks like a simple
> filter
> on the Unix command line.  In goes SGML, out comes PCL (or Postscript if
> you
> prefer).
> 
> This is all actually easier than it sounds, yet somehow had evaded me for
> months (again, duh).  You could probably dispense with Perl, and use IIS
> and
> VBA, to simplify it even more.  I'm looking forward to eventually using
> IE5
> to process my XML files on the server and dispensing with Jade/Word (and
> DSSSL!).  But for now, what a relief!
> 
> Jack Fitzpatrick
> jfitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx
> ADP
> Milwaukie, OR
> (503) 786-3114
> 
> 
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