[texhax] Callable TeX?

[Fehd, Ronald J. (CDC/OCOO/ITSO)]

> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:11:10 +0200
> From: Peter Davis <pfd at pfdstudio.com>
> 
> I'm investigating using TeX as a composition engine for an existing
> publishing workflow.  The goal would be to make TeX callable, so I
> would
> pass in some text and some parameters, and get back dvi.
> 
> I know Jonathan Fine did some work a while ago on a TeX daemon.  Has
> anyone
> heard anything further about this?  Any other efforts to make TeX a
> callable
> library or something?
> 
> Thank you,
> -pd

in the previous century I programmed on BigIron==z/OS==MVS
and batch processing using ISPF was the only way to go.

I worked in the provided editor of my statistical software SAS
for several years until my companion/partner/girlfriend
whispered in my year: batch.
and have pretty much not looked back to an interactive session
in SAS
since then

With that knowledge I have written a SAS wiki page:

Batch Processing under Windows 

TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/6zlqoh 

http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Batch_processing_under_Windows

the issues are pretty much the same for TeX users
under Windows:

- - - 00-LaTeX-this.bat - - -
pdfLaTeX my-TeX-doc

the wiki page discusses how to modify SAS configuration and autoexec
files
I am not enough of a TeXnician to even want to consider creating or
modifying
a TeX configuration file
but it is simple in SAS.
and may be part of the requestor's solution

My wishlist for TeXlive is
* autoexec.tex
* command line parameters and parsing

Here is an example using my knowledge and syntax of SAS:

- - - 00-LaTeX-this-with-parms.bat - - -
pdfLaTeX my-boilerplate-doc -sysparm='\input{i-customer-Fehd}'

and another way of doing the boilerplate with parms is:

%name: boilerplate-Fehd.tex
\input{i-customer-Fehd}
\input{boilerplate-about-this-issue}

%name: i-customer-Fehd.tex
\newcommand\CustName{R J Fehd}
\newcommand\CustAddr{Atl GA USA}


Ron Fehd  the {SAS} macro maven

for non-native speakers here is a defintion of boilerplate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_(text)
compare with autoexec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT
and note: SAS autoexec is autoexec.sas