[texhax] perl for TeX presentations (was: LaTeX users mailing list)

[Suresh Govindachar]

   On 9/11/2013 4:20 AM, Shawn Wilson wrote:
   >
   > Some users like mailing lists, some like irc, some like the web.
   > I find its a culture thing. If I need perl help, I'll get on
   > IRC. If I want Unix help, I'll use a mailing list. Apparently we
   > don't have a mac.info archive for this list (maybe that should
   > be done).
   >
   > I think there's also a user acceptance part to this. Not many
   > people use tex. Everyone I know that does layout stuff used xml
   > (docbook and such). My cousin did his EE thesis in word (no idea
   > how). At $work we have perl scripts that generate documents
   > (don't ask - I didn't do it).

   I do it -- for presentations!  A bit more info is provided below.

   > I only started using tex because I am finding the need to do
   > presentations and refuse to use anything I can't track in source
   > control (and I *hate* xml).

   I write my presentations in perl -- when I execute the resulting
   perl script, it writes out a plain TeX file and applies pdfTeX on
   that plain TeX file to provide me the desired pdf presentation.
   The pdf presentation can be fairly complex (with transitions,
   embedded movies, right-click resulting in a drop-down menu of the
   table of contents etc.) The perl script can also generate a plain
   text file that can be printed to form the hand-out -- I prefer
   such a hand-out to printing the pdf presentation as hand-out.

   > As an aside of my experience so far: I've found, info for
   > creating non-science docs is lacking (I might want math in a doc
   > but it isn't my use case). Everything else is starting to ship
   > with an online package manager (perl has shipped with cpan for
   > ~15 years) yet tlmgr is separate.

   --Suresh