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Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 14:57:32 +0100
From: Ross Gardler <rgardler@apache.org>
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Subject: Re: is Forrest easilly scriptable ?
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Joao Miguel Ferreira wrote:
> Hello all at Forrest, 
> 
> this might be a crazy idea... is Forrest easiy sriptable ?
> 
> I've used Forrest for 2 or 3 documents I've written (and I love it).
> 
> Know I'm involved in a project that will need to automatically,
> periodically, send pdf documents as e-mail attaches to system
> administrators. Why not Forrest for the doc generation ?
> 
> Can I easilly embedd forrest inside shell scripts ? Just gessing: 1) I
> would generate XML automatically; 2) I would generate png images
> automatically; 3) then I would invoque forrest; 4) then I would remove
> the pdf file from the 'site' sub-dir and send it by e-mail....
> 
> Can anyone comment on this ? Is Forrest the tool I'm searching for ? or
> are there other tools (bessides Forrest) that are more adequate ?
> 
> Size is not a problem.

I'm glad you say "sie is not a problem". Forrest is big and clunky if 
all you wan tto do is send out the odd mail or two of specific files.

There are lots of options for scripting Forrest. It has a CLI, it can be 
run from ANT and it has an application for automatically building sites 
via a cron job.

Your use cases are too general and varied for us to be able to give 
clear guidance, but in general, yes, Forrest is scriptable.

However...

One of the big limitations of Forrest is that it is difficult to 
generate single files. So if you want a single PDF to be updated, you 
would have to build the whole site. This is not a problem if your site 
is small, but if it is large it can be an issue. Forrest is not really 
designed for one off page generation.

Having said that, there are mechnisms for limiting what pages are generated.

Ross