On Jul 28, 2010, at 1:05 PM, Will Robertson wrote:
> On 2010-07-27 00:07:02 +0930, Florian Gilcher <f...@andersground.net> said:
>
>> I really like the following feature of pdftex and others for development
>> purposes:
>> \input{|"darcs changes -s"} % print a detailed log of changes
>> and include that into my document as a "running log" for other reviewers.
>> Sure, it requires --shell-escape and --enable-write18, but thats just fine
>> in my environment.
>
> Actually I think this is a MiKTeX-only feature of pdfTeX (or it was last time
> I checked). Is there a significant problem to doing this?:
>
> \immediate\write18{darcs changes -s > tmp.txt}
> \input{tmp.txt}
>
> Wrap it up in a macro and it's no less convenient than using the pipe, right?
>
> Will
Actually, pdftex in both texlive 2009 and 2010 supports it.
The difference between MiKTeX and texlive is that MiKTeX has a special CLI flag
for it (--enable-pipes) while pdftex on texlive checks for (--shell-escape).
A did a little digging yesterday night and it seems like about the only reason
XeTeX does not support this is because of a preprocessor macro checking for
pdftex in texmfmp.c and texmfmp.h (all involving open_in_or_pipe and
open_out_or_pipe):
http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/TRUNK/texk/web2c/lib/texmfmp.c
http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/TRUNK/texk/web2c/texmfmp.h
Now, I would try my theory if i could just get XeTeX (or, more specifically,
the bundled ICU) to build from sources on Snow Leopard...
Well: the problem with \write18: it is not quite the same (for example, i
cannot write to a pipe [1]), it clutters the file system and I cannot read from
any arbitrary source. Sure, thats a convenience problem, but considering that
the functionality is there and "the other pdf generating tex" supports it, it
would be nice if xetex had it too.
Regards,
Florian
[1] not that I know any case where that would be needed...
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