Re: [Pointless-devel] Is Pointless being maintained?

[Robert P R. <ri...@cs...>]

Okay, here are a few patches. I've broken them up into small pieces
so that it's easy for you to just take some of them if you want.

pointless-svg.patch - Adds a new command, =svg, for including SVG
    graphics (note - I've patched Makefile.am and configure.in, so it
    requires re-running automake and autoconf.)
pointless-coloreps.patch - Adds a new commands, =coloreps, for including
    eps graphics in color (w/ transparent background) instead of
    grayscale
pointless-cache.patch - Makes the svg and eps modules perform 'real'
    caching: if a cached version of the .png exists, they won't
    regenerate it unless it's older than the .eps or .png. I had some
    figures that took a long time to render on my laptop, so this sped
    things up considerably.  In order for this to work, I had to change
    the name of the cache directory to include the resolution. The SVG
    patch must be applied before this one
pointless-plp.patch - If the input filename ends in '.plp', runs it
    through the C pre-processor before opening it. I did this for a few
    reasons:
        * It allows me to use familiar #include and #define syntax
        * The =include command was doing strange things for me, like
          putting the included file into a strange order. I know, I
          should have just fixed it, but I wanted the full 'power', such
          as it is, of cpp
        * It lets me do 'header guard' type stuff for files included by
          more than one file. So, when I broke my presentation up into
          small files, I could have them all include 'defs.plp' so that
          I could use any of them standalone while I was working of
          them.
        * It theoretically allows the user to pass -DFOO type arguments
          to cpp, so that you could have the presentation behave
          differently depending on what arguments you passed to it. I
          don't have support for these yet, though
    Note - the processed file goes into $TMPDIR or /tmp - I wanted to
    put it into the cache dir, but the pll object doesn't yet exist at
    the time the .pll/.plp file is opened.
pointless-frame_duration.patch - There's an assert in the code that the
    duration of a frame is > 0. I found that if I left pointless sitting
    at one slide for too long, this would fire when I tried to leave the
    slide. Not too pretty in the middle of a talk. :) So I just changed
    the code to make the duration tiny but positive if this happens.
pointless-item_nostep.patch - I don't like the default behavior of
    having every item start a new step. I figured you guys might not
    take this patch, but some people might find it useful.

A tarball of the patches is available here:
http://www.flux.utah.edu/users/ricci/software/pointless-patches.tar.gz

Here are some slides that I made with pointless and these patches:
HTML/PNG:
http://www.flux.utah.edu/users/ricci/slides/assign-informs/
Source:
http://www.flux.utah.edu/users/ricci/slides/assign-informs.tar.gz

-- 
/-----------------------------------------------------------
| Robert P Ricci <ri...@cs...> | <ri...@fl...>
| Research Associate, University of Utah Flux Group
| www.flux.utah.edu | www.emulab.net
\-----------------------------------------------------------