Graphical Front End for the idvi Application

The idvi application currently runs as a command-line program under unix. It is actually a shell script which sets up a bunch of command-line arguments to the real application, which is the class idvi.split.DVISplitApplication.

In order to run on a Macintosh or Windows machine, we really should have a GUI for the idvi application. This interface could ask the user to define a bunch of parameters the first time it starts up.

Here are some issues to consider:

  1. How do you make a double-clickable application out of a Java application? Can we somehow handle drag-and-drop?

  2. Where do we store parameters telling us where to find fonts, etc? I suppose that these can go in the same directory as the application, if we know where that is.

  3. Do the TeX implementations for Windows and Macintosh use standard pk font files?

  4. Filename length may be an issue; Macintosh is limited to 32 characters. Currently there is no consideration of whether a generated filename will be too long.

  5. How do we handle embedded images? The current implementation writes a file listing images which need to be generated, and a shell script uses Ghostscript and PBMPlus to generate the images.

  6. How do we handle copying fonts to the server? The current implementation works much as the image generation code does, writing a file for later processing by a shell script.

  7. The new GUI application can interface directly with the class idvi.split.Splitter. Have a look at the idvi.split.DVISplitApplication to see how much is involved in using the Splitter class.