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From: oc@vmp.com (Orlan Cannon)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Common TeX
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.025033.11400@vmp.com>
Date: 20 Nov 90 02:50:33 GMT
References: <1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp> <1990Nov15.085657.2589@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <1990Nov19.192320.25129@warwick.ac.uk>
Organization: Video Marketing & Publications, Inc., Oradell, NJ
Lines: 40

In article <1990Nov19.192320.25129@warwick.ac.uk> cudcv@warwick.ac.uk
     (Rob McMahon) writes, in a justifiably irritated tone:
>In article <1990Nov15.085657.2589@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
>marcel@cs.caltech.edu writes large chunks of gratuitous flaming in response to
><1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp> klaus u schallhorn (klaus@cnix.uucp), the
>first chunk of which has no information content, followed by
>
>>> I would have loved to
>>>     cat whatever | tex | lpr -dvi
>>
>>Do you?  Why do you prefer typing "cat whatever.tex | tex" instead of "tex
>>whatever"? The desire to type 7 extra characters is very unlike UNIX.
>
>I don't think he literally meant `cat'.  I've often wanted to use TeX as a
>filter, without having to create and tidy up unnecessary temporary files.

Is this so hard? I do this all the time.  Every night I dump data from
a database into a parser, which passes it through a formatter to add
LaTeX headers and formatting codes, which then passes it to LaTeX and
on to the printer.  It's all waiting in the morning when I come in. The
main shell script I use for this and other similar jobs is called
"printtex".  I type "printtex abcdefg.tex" and it prints on the default
output device. It has flags for using different output devices and
different fonts (variations of latex.fmt).  It looks after all the
temporary files and creates them, scans them for errors that I might
want to look at, and deletes them.

TeX is verbose enough to let me create several of these kinds of scripts,
for different purposes.  My only regret is that it is not *more* verbose.

For you non-programmers out there:  it's *easy* to ignore output, just
scan it and pipe it to /dev/null (or the equivalent).  It's when you
don't get enough output that there's a problem.

Hey.  I'm not a TeXpert.  Get it straight.  This is a trivial problem.
It's not a TeX problem.  It's a problem in how you deal with TeX.
-- 
Orlan Cannon                            oc@vmp.com
Video Marketing & Publications, Inc.    (800) 627-4551
Oradell, NJ 07649