Hi Simon
Thanks for your input. As you say most of your points are not directly
relevant to the TT plugin, although I will have a look at performance
and error handling. I think that your points are relevant to other
Template-Latex users and am posting back to the list.
The plugin should be able to distinguish between different types of
errors and warnings (by examining the latex program output) and maybe
raise one of a predefined set of exceptions, with filter options to
specify whether it should abort or continue on errors. This would help
in cases where it is imperative that documents are complete (i.e. abort
on any error or missing image) or where you want the system to deliver
whatever it can (i.e. keep on going whatever the LaTeX error). I think
this is preferable to trying to determine whether you have got valid
LaTeX input (just as "only perl can parse Perl", "only latex can parse
LaTeX").
With regards layers on top of the LaTeX plugin, I think that might be
something to think of later. There might be some mileage in a library,
something akin to "Splash", to address certain well defined tasks.
Regards
Andrew
Simon Moore wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Glad you have taken up the Latex side of things. A few suggestions.
We tend to use TT to produce on the fly PDF reports on our website.
I appreciate some people will be using Latex for things other than
PDF. The things we have noticed as being issues and I have no idea
whether it would actually be something that could be fixed in TT,
hence mailing offlist:
1) It is very slow at producing PDFs from TT (Perhaps this is
just Latex, but is there anything that can be done to speed it up -
perhaps there is a better engine for PDFs than latex and we should
build a plugin for that?)
2) Latex while in theory you can do anything with it, is
actually very difficult to do some simple things that look good and
can cope with varying input data. e.g. we produce reports with graphs
in, tables and text. The text can be very variable in length. We
have a number of tables of data etc etc all this input is created by
TT. Perhaps there is scope to provide an abstraction layer for, for
instance standard report type layouts where everything is optimised
and all the headache of writing good latex to cope with all the
variable sizes and length is done for you. For example PDF report
writer http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_not_evil/ which is far from
mature but has a nice idea: throw XML data at it and see it formatted
nicely approach - which seems to fit the TT philosophy of data
abstraction.
3) Might be nice to have some predefined Text filters that
ensure everything is legal that you input to Latex
4) Better graphics support - very annoying when it crashes
with an error because some image is missing (also hard to tell this is
the error without running pdflatex at the command line) - we have to
write loads of code to check things like this to ensure robustness.
As we run the same TT code on windows and Linux we also have to detect
the OS of the server and write in the graphics search Paths.
Anyway I appreciate these are not necessarily issues with TT's latex
plugin but I think they are things that might be solved / worked
around at the plugin level. Perhaps have a low level plugin and
higher level plugins for those of us who want to be abstracted from
the gory details of Latex (or other PDF engines).
Kind Regards
Simon
At 09:34 01/06/2006, you wrote:
Having had more of a look through the Template-Latex code I plan to
make (at least) two releases in the next couple of weeks.
The first release will remove the 'latex', 'pdflatex' and 'dvips'
parameters from the filter interface. These parameters allow
absolute program pathnames to be specified in template code and to my
mind represent a security risk. Currently the code builds command
lines that are executed with system(), using either the paths
configured when the module was installed (defaulting to
"/usr/bin/latex", etc) or paths specified as arguments to the FILTER
directive. The current code does no sanity checking of the paths, so
there is nothing to stop a malicious template specifying something
like "FILTER latex(latex => 'rm -rf /home')". It should still be
possible though to set up these paths from perl code as configuration
items when TT2 is invoked. I hope to make this first release
sometime next week.
Please let me know if you have any issues with this change.
The second release will follow a week or two later and will add
functionality to run "bibtex" and "makeindex" on the latex code if
the plugin detects that that is necessary, plus the plugin will
re-run "latex" (or "pdflatex") if it detects that there are
unresolved labels.
I will provide an option to turn off this behaviour, so that the
plugin just runs "latex" a specified number of times: e.g. once,
twice (needed if there are forward references or a table of contents)
or three times (e.g. if there are forward references and a table of
contents) irrespective of whether that leaves unresolved labels. I
will refine this proposal and post it when I make the first release.
If you have any comments on this let me know.
I also have in mind to add options to explicitly specify the
temporary directory in which the latex commands are run and to
suppress the subsequent removal of this directory. This would
primarily be for testing and debugging and the options would not be
exposed as FILTER parameters at the template level.
Regards
Andrew
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