I thought that it might be both useful and interesting to hear about how XyUsers have used XPPs ability to easily integrate your own Perl-based Division/ Job/ Site tools to solve a particular problem – whether that be a general purpose tool or solving what might appear to be a very publication-specific problem.
One simple Job tool that we have set up and has proved to be quite useful is named “showpages_snapshot” and it displays page count information for that Job.
The obvious way to show this information in PathFinder would be to switch on “View Page Counts” and then, of course, to “refresh”. That does indeed show us the information we require but it also puts a very significant overhead onto PathFinder as the information is obtained again everytime you move around your structure. I invariably switch it off again very quickly.
What we did was set up a Job Tool that made use of the showpages command – the same command that PathFinder uses. However in our output we:
- display the page count information
- list the Divisions in DA ticket order (much easier to check that numbering is as it should be when it is listed in publication order)
- list any Divisions not mentioned in the DA ticket (these may be legitimately not in the DA ticket but can act as a warning)
- display some totals
Here is an example of information displayed in PathFinder via “View Page Counts”, and then how the Job Tool displays it.
Essentially the Job Tool will:
- gets a list of all the Divisions in the Job
- runs showpages -job -ds -t (this outputs information in DA ticket order)
- loop through the showpages output building our own output (in this case an HTML page), and also “tick” that a Division has been dealt with
- keeps a page total to output at the end
- output the list of all the Divisions that were not in the showpages output
- open up the HTML page in the users browser.
And as I write this I can already see an enhancement that would be easy to implement in Perl – to also put out the Arabic equivalent of those Roman numbers…..
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4 users commented on " What tools are on your Swiss Army knife? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackMy tools that I can’t live without are simple and basic: One to open a windows explorer in a Job and the other is to open a command window on the Division level.
Paul,
After over 20 years using XPP I have so many tools that I need an entire kitchen drawer devoted to them.
I have found that some of the most useful in the division tools category are divtracerem.pl (remove traces and sets each division ticket’s Enable Edit Trace to none) and remove_corrupted_pages.pl (allows user to remove pages that have become corrupted or perhaps unwanted – uses divshrink)
In my other drawer (job tools) there are just too many to put in jsc directory so we have created a perl/Tk script to allow users to launch a variety of perl scripts from the main script. We have organized our scripts in non-xpp directories in subfolders based on what they do.
e.g. spellcheck, wordsearch, automated loep, automated citi, etc.
Moving away from UNIX into Windows has been a very interesting experiance but has given us an opportunity to rethink the way tools should be layed out.
This will be one of the topics I will touch on in the XyAdmin Best Practices session at the October Conference. Would look forward to talk more about it.
Gerrit,
I must admit that my most used Job Tool is probably the one to open up a Windows Explorer window. I frequently then go on to do a “Command Prompt Here” so really should set up an enhanced job tool to do both.
Gary,
I like the idea of a master Job Tool. Could even tailor what tools appear based on the Job path (we have a number of job specific tools), or maybe even based on the users machine name.
Thanks for the ideas.
Another Windows Explorer type Job Tool we have is explorer_graphics.pl
That one looks in the Job Ticket, grabs whatever Image Library Chase entries it finds, looks those up in the Graphics Configuration and then opens up an Explorer window for each corresponding Library Path.