Adventures in #techcomm automation… deep in the muck of file conversions, one man struggles to fix the problems introduced by the conversion. (1/10)
Some co-workers were using FrameMaker. One feature everybody seems to use is its graphic overlays — importing a raster graphic and adding callouts w/o affecting the graphic file itself. Nice, until you have to migrate out. (2/10)
Conversion system's answer: make the overlay an SVG, referencing the underlying raster graphic. Sounds reasonable.
Oh, did I mention the rasters are .BMP format? Going to a cloud system, where they'll have to be downloaded each time the topic gets edited? (3/10)
Oh, did I mention the rasters are .BMP format? Going to a cloud system, where they'll have to be downloaded each time the topic gets edited? (3/10)
"Whatever," I said. "We can mass-convert them to PNG, and do a quick S&R to change the names inside the SVG files."
"Cool," they said. "But we don't like the 'SVG-03-9.svg' names coming out of the tool. Can they fix that?" (4/10)
"Cool," they said. "But we don't like the 'SVG-03-9.svg' names coming out of the tool. Can they fix that?" (4/10)
Seems like a reasonable request. We ask the conversion vendor if they can name the SVG files after the BMP-now-PNG that they overlay.
"Sure," says the vendor. "It'll be $$$$$$$."
Boss flinches at the number of zeroes. "Can we do it in-house?" (5/10)
"Sure," says the vendor. "It'll be $$$$$$$."
Boss flinches at the number of zeroes. "Can we do it in-house?" (5/10)
All this took place while I was on vacation. I talked it over with the co-worker yesterday, thought of one problem (several SVG files use the same PNG, so we have to account for that), figured out how to fix it.
We tell the boss I'm going to take a crack at this. (6/10)
We tell the boss I'm going to take a crack at this. (6/10)
2nd day back on the job after vacation… I spend most of the day grinding out a shell script, with an embedded awk script & two Perl one-liners, less than 100 lines total. It takes about 10 seconds on a medium sized manual. (7/10)
It converts the BMP files to PNG, renames the SVG files (avoiding bunnystomps), then walks through the book and updates all the references (including fixing a subdirectory pointer the vendor left out). It'll save us a bunch of money and days of manual fixing. (8/10)
My horrible innovation: the awk script creates a tmp file with the commands to rename the SVG files. After executing it, an awk one-liner turns it into a series of Perl s/orig/new/ commands for updating the references. Sometimes, you gotta get ugly. (9/10)
The moral of the story: if you're in #techcomm, being able to write scripts can save you weeks of grunt work, giving you more time to <s>goof off</s> focus on important stuff. (10/end)
