On 5 Jun 1998, Fabrice POPINEAU wrote:
> It is yet to be tested. Actually, CreateProcess() accepts '/' as path
> separator for program names. This not yet widely known, but under the
> Win32 system , '/' and '\\' are equally treated. What mislead users is
> that command.com does not yet do the same.
Ok. Is CreateProcess() part of the Win32 Module? If so, is it an
alternative to system()?
> No problem at all. It is even better to give '/' to latex than '\' :-)
Correct! In the LaTeX calling sub I set $dd to '/' because of that.
> No, but given that under Win95 you can'use pstoimg *with* pipes ...
That's true. No pipes under Win95. What about NT? Do pipes work there?
> And more important : I guess the IM module under win32 will load the
> IM .dll, not call convert. So it would be more efficient. Sorry, but I
> have no time for the moment to do this.
Yes, given that when calling covert (in the DLL) it does *only* what is
supposed to do. I think of on-the-fly-conversions from ppm to mif and back
and so on. All this would have to be evaluated; unfortunately I don't have
time for that either. :-(
Still I doubt whether the multiple cropping, padding and the final
conversion all can be done with one call to convert (in the DLL). I don't
know either whether convert has the directional cropping required by
pstoimg (i.e., crop as much of a unique color from e.g. the left).
> One problem with netpbm is errors : admitting one of the program is
> failing in the mid of some multiple pipe call, the effect is
> disastrous. Even under NT, I get GPF due to some netpbm program
> waiting for data on stdin, and receiving eof (or broken_pipe) because
> the preceding one has failed. This is unclean. I have looked for and
> found at least one error (resulting in this symtom) in one of the
> lib*.c files of netpbm, namely not checking that some number was
> actually read by scanf(). But I have lost the patch.
That sounds bad. Anyway, even if no failures occur in every part of the
multiple pipe, it does not work: I get a pnm file in img1.gif instead of
gif. Calling ppmtogif manually does the job. So I resolved to using
pstoimg_nopipes.
By the way: Is netpbm maintained by someone? Is there someone who would
accept bug reports and create a new version? There is e.g. also pnmtopng
(and vice versa) that should be integrated into the netpbm package. Just
some thoughts...
Cheers,
Marek
