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.
