Subject: ANNOUNCE: TeX::DVI, Hyphen and Font::TFM in version 0.04
From: [email-masked] (Honza Pazdziora)
Date: 2 Jun 1997 14:41:52 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.modules

Hallo,

I have uploaded to PAUSE new versions of my three TeX related Perl modules:
TeX::DVI, TeX::Hyphen and Font::TFM. They are of version 0.04 now. They
should appear on CPAN soon. URL http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/perl/
is the primary location.

The modules help in accessing TeX input and output data format from
Perl. TeX::DVI has low level interface for writting out the .dvi
(DeVice Independent) file; TeX::Hyphen allows hyphenation of words
according to TeX's hyphenation patterns; and Font::TFM provides methods
to read metric information from .tfm files. Readme's are included with
the modules, so I would only include here part of my email answer that I
have written today:

---

>	After a moderate amount of hacking, I thought I'd better ask you
> personally : at first sight, the DVI module helps transforming a ASCII
> string into a DVI file ... is that it ?  

Well, not really, it's not a filter like mpage (that makes
PostScript). It's merely a low level interface to those functions that
appear in the DVI file. So the user needs to know what he is doing,
what commands are needed. In this, the dvitype program (and its
source) is good start.

So you for example write

	my $dvi = new TeX::DVI "texput.dvi";
	$dvi->preamble();
	$dvi->begin_page();

and this will create a file texput.dvi and put preamble of the DVI
format and the mark of the begin of new page into it. And so on. I am
not sure if anybody would appreciate interface at higher level.

As for the Font::TFM module, it reads the info from a .tfm file about
the metrics of a font and the methods allow to get the info.

The two modules can cooperate in producing good output, because they
do ligature and kerning expansion authomatically. But they also give
user methods for any DVI command.

---

Enjoy!

--Honza Pazdziora

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Honza Pazdziora | [email-masked] | http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/
                   I can take or leave it if I please
     Have you done your DES today? --> http:/www.des.sollentuna.se/