Re: [Groff] PDFPIC macro

[Keith Marshall]

On 18/09/14 23:24, Deri James wrote:
> I think that perl projects which rely on complex module interrelationships, 
> do 
> struggle on windows platforms, particularly where there are underlying C 
> libraries with perl bindings, but if you are just using perl as a scripting 
> language with no external dependencies, I can't see a difference to other 
> scripted languages such as the Bourne shell.

An MS-Windows executable, (such as groff.exe), cannot (easily) spawn a
Bourne shell script, (because there is no native interpreter for it);
the same is true of perl.  Of course, it is possible to spawn such
scripts *indirectly*, (by explicitly spawning a suitable interpreter),
but, depending on which specific interpreter implementation happens to
be installed, (there is no standard), YMMV.

> Certainly I have seen gropdf being used in a windows environment

Was that under MS-Windows natively?  Or under Cygwin?

> and I have no reason to believe the subset of the code used to
> retrieve the MediaBox of a pdf document would not work equally well.

Possibly, but to invoke it from within an MS-Windows executable is
messy, and potentially unreliable.

> I'd be very happy to give assistance in understanding the perl code,
> if you want to give it a go in C++.

A good starting point may be to implement a C/C++ library function, to
extract the MediaBox properties; that would open the gate to a possible
pdfbb request, which gtroff.exe could process internally.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.