Hi,
Yesterday I downloaded and installed latex2html on my computer. I'm messing
around with graph theory (and lots of remedial math) and needed a way to
order my thoughts in browsable format.
This is some very nice software, I love it!
It needs some refactoring though, and I want to know if anyone would mind
if I took a swing at it. I'm new to TeX, but a pretty sure hand at Perl.
I've already seen some stuff I'd like to do:
* I think there might have been a big change in the way pnmcrop works,
because I was able to remove a big chunk of code from pstoimg based
on a discrepency between pnmcrops function and its implementation
in pstoimg.pin;
very roughly, this:
my $crop_cmd = "$PNMCROP < $in | $PNMCROP -black -s"
print "trying $crop_cmd, now\n" if $opt{debug};
do_cmd ( $in, $tmp, $crop_cmd ) || return 0;
can replace the existing code;
(er I won't burden you with around 50 lines of code, it's the
central while loop constructing pstoimg's pnmcrop command,
passing it to gs, and a couple lines above that, as well.)
It's not necessary to nibble away at the edges using crop, you
can just tell it what color you don't like and the -s flag
handles the rest. I'm not sure if older versions of netpbm
had substantially different command line interfaces though,
in which case some version checks would need to be included.
That's not a problem, the netpbm people keep the old versions
available.
* General code cleanup (I think I see at least two different stylistic
approaches in the code and some refactoring and pretty printing
might help with maintenance.)
* Several different methods of accessing data in files. I think
that could be cleaned up very easily, using the IO objects.
* Total freakin rewrite. OOPs. Did I say that? I just think a
lot of this code would look real good in its own module, in a
class by itself, so to say. Abstracting the functionality of
pstoimg & brethren into an image manipulation class would make
maintenance a lot simpler, too.
* Error Handling. Mostly pretty cool except most of the posts
I saw in the mailing list were gs 'Illegal Seek' and other
arcane gobbledygeek. Carp (or even Coy if you think Carp
smells), the IO objects and stricter error checking would
help users to know what to post and developers tired of poking
through -debug output.
* I'm bored. I've been on vacation too long and I want something
nifty to work on. Trying to grok graph theory and reconcile it
to principles in molbio got me on this visual kick (& Knuth
is da bomb.)
That's it, except to say again I think latex2html is a very nice program.
CA
--
There was a time
A wind that blew so young
For this could be the biggest sky
And I could have the faintest idea
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