Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 195)

I’m currently generating my new book on “functional programming in Scala” as a PDF using a combination of Pandoc and LaTeX, and as a result it feels like I’m opening the same PDF file about 100 times a day.

A little while ago I decided it would be really nice if I could go directly to the page I’m interested in when the PDF opens, so I cobbled together a Unix shell script and some Applescript that (a) opens the PDF in the Mac Preview app, and (b) goes directly to the page I’m interested in. It turns out that Preview isn’t very scriptable, so I have to jump through a few hoops to get to the desired page:

#!/bin/sh

FILE="${PWD}/book.pdf"

if [ -z "$1" ]
then
  echo "Dude, I need a page number."
  exit -1
fi

PAGE=$1

# ----------------------
# Applescript below here
# ----------------------

osascript <<EOF

set pageNumber to $PAGE
set fileName to "$FILE"

set posixFile to POSIX file fileName
tell application "Finder" to open posixFile

delay 2
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "g" using {option down, command down}
    keystroke pageNumber
    delay 1
    keystroke return
end tell

EOF

I named this script preview.sh, and I run it like this to go directly to page 20 in the PDF (which is named book.pdf):

./preview.sh 20

As usual, there are probably other/better ways to do this, but (a) I can confirm that this works, and (b) a lot of other things I tried didn’t work.

As a quick note, this URL shared a script to list all of the LuaLaTeX font names, and it almost worked for me.

The third line in the source code didn’t work for me, so I replaced it will a hard-coded path to the luaotfload-names.luc file. I’m using MacTex, and I found that file in the directory shown in the following script, which you’ll need to change on your system. With that change, this resulting script worked for me, listing all of the LuaLaTeX font names:

#!/usr/bin/env texlua

kpse.set_program_name("ListLuatexFonts")

cachefile = "/Users/al/Library/texlive/2016/texmf-var/luatex-cache/generic/names/luaotfload-names.luc"
fontlist = dofile(cachefile)
assert(fontlist,"Could not load font name database")

local tmp = {}

for _,font in ipairs(fontlist.mappings) do
  tmp[#tmp + 1] = font.fontname
end
table.sort(tmp)

for _,fontname in ipairs(tmp) do
  print(fontname)
end

As the second line of code there implies, I named this script ListLuatexFonts. I put this source code in this file, then made the file executable on my Mac OS X (macOS) system, like this:

chmod +x ListLuatexFonts

Then ran the script like this:

./ListLuatexFonts

Unfortunately that results in over 1,400 LuaLaTeX font names, so what I did next was redirect that output to a file like this:

./ListLuatexFonts > LuatexFonts.txt

I could then look at that file with a text editor to see what fonts are available to me.

At the moment I’m just getting started with LaTeX again after more than five years away from it, so I don’t know the difference between LuaLaTeX and LuaTeX, but if you’re interested in what fonts are available to you, I hope this script is helpful, and of course many thanks to the original author for this script (which was originally written by other people before him, so we’re all just passing it on).