Re: [groff] pdfpic.tmac

[Keith Marshall]

On 22/08/18 17:42, Heinz-Jürgen Oertel wrote:
> I'm using groff and -Tpdf and pictures included with .PDFPIC.
> PDFPIC always crashes. The reason is, that pdfinfo has in its stdout
> text not only text but also a '\0' char. The effect is, that pdfinfo
> | grep gives an error message instead of the line containing the
> measurements.
> 
> What I did, is adding --text to grep, like 
> 
> .sy pdfinfo @$1 | grep --text "Page *size" | ..
> 
> guilty is pdfinfo
> $ pdfinfo -v
> pdfinfo version 0.66.0
> Copyright 2005-2018 The Poppler Developers - http://poppler.freedesktop.org
> Copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC
> 
> 
> But anyway adding --text is a good workaround

Surely, the proper solution, as I suggested when PDFPIC was first
mooted, is to avoid dependencies on third party tools, such as pdfinfo,
in the first place, and to implement the necessary bounding box look-up
directly within groff's input parser.  I even posted *working* code:

  https://osdn.net/users/keith/pf/groff-psbb/wiki/FrontPage

and offered that for comment, on this very list:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2017-10/msg00017.html

The response was, to say the least, extremely disappointing ... only
Deri deigned to reply, positively, but (alas) not always on-list.  I'd
still like to see this integrated into groff, but I'm not willing to
devote my own energy to dealing with the abomination that is automake,
so I will need someone else to assist with build system integration.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.