Publications ScriptsThese scripts are used to generate both the publications and courses pages on the Carnegie Mellon Graphics website. They are posted here in the hope that they will be useful to other schools. If you use these for your own page, we request only that (1) you include an acknowledgement and a link back to this page on each of the pages you generate (the easiest way to do this is to add some text to the footer), and (2) if you make any changes that you think would be useful to others, you make these available for others to use. The software was written largely by Christopher Twigg with some modifications by Jim McCann. It is all written in C++ and should be easy to compile on any Linux machine (Windows and OS X should also be doable but might take a little more work). It is released under a BSD license, and can be downloaded here. It is likely that you won't want your publications page to look exactly like
ours. Superficial changes can easily be made using style sheets; larger changes can be made by modifying
the code itself (primarily OverviewThe main publications database is a single BiBTeX file. This is for several reasons:
Out particular BiBTeX database has been enhanced with a number of extra fields, such as abtract, images, etc. It is described in full here. Running the scriptsTo run the scripts, you first need to be logged in locally to
You can force this to get set every time you log into if( `hostname` =~ 'kip.graphics.cs.cmu.edu' ) then setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr0/www-scripts/lib endif pubsPagesTo get a full list of options, run the option1 = value option2 = value Then, run The script will read in the appropriate files (described below) and
generate the files Note that the script relies on certain bibtex-generated files to
run correctly. I therefore suggest running it from a wrapper script
like the following, (here, #!/bin/sh latex dummy bibtex dummy latex dummy bibtex dummy LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr0/www-scripts/lib /usr0/www-scripts/genPages/pubsPages sthg.cfgFurther explanation of the various options follows. --bibtex-file and --bbl-fileIn order for the script to run, it first needs a BiBTeX file in the
appropriate format. Less obviously, it also
needs a compiled BiBTeX file to generate the citation that appears
in the abstracts file. To generate this, we need to create a
\documentclass{article}
\author{Nobody}
\title{Placeholder Document}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
This is a placeholder document which just includes all the
referenced in glab.bib so that I can later extract formatting
information about them.
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{glab}
\end{document}
We simply need to Note that here we are using the "plain" biliography style. More exotic
bibliography styles may stick extra junk into the --homepage-fileIn order to generate links to people's home pages, they need to
be listed in the homepages file. This is a file with the format
John Smith http://www.example.com/~jsmith Jenny Public http://www.example.com/~jbrown George Washington http://www.whitehous.gov/~george Note that the current script only uses the last name and first initial (this is because there was some variation in the way some people spell their first names). So if we ever get two people with the same last name and first initial, this will need to be changed. At current the homepage file contains anyone who is or has ever had an association with Carnegie Mellon; other coauthors are not linked. This is mostly laziness on account of me not wanting to add every coauthor, but it also helps to signal people which paper authors are CMU-associated. --header and --footerThese are placed at the start and end respectively of every HTML file generated, and provide the opportunity to add logos, links to other pages, etc. Should be fairly self-explanatory. --extensionThe current graphics lab site uses PHP for all its pages (to enable
rotating sidebar images). I recognize though that other sites may want
to use a --bibtex-databaseAll publications include a link to view the BiBTeX for convenience in citation. To make this possible, we strip out all the "extended" parts of the bibtex entry and place it in a GDBM database that is indexed by the key (think of GDBM as a file-based hashtable); this makes it possible to write a simple script that very quickly pulls up bibtex entries that looks like this: #!/usr/local/bin/perl -Tw
use strict;
use GDBM_File;
use CGI qw(:standard);
my $query = new CGI;
my $filename = "bibtexEntries.gdbm";
my %entries = ();
tie %entries, 'GDBM_File', $filename, &GDBM_READER, 0644
or die "cannot open file '$filename'.";
my $key = param('key');
print $query->header('text/plain');
if( defined($key) && defined($entries{$key}) )
{
print "$entries{$key}\n";
}
else
{
print "Error: unknown key.\n";
}
untie %entries;
--venues-listIn order to generate the shortened publication names
(e.g., "ACM SIGGRAPH") that appear on the publications index page,
we need to have some way to map from full publication names
(" 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation")
to shortened names ("Symposium on Computer Animation"). I have chosen to
do this with regular expressions, which theoretically gives a lot of
flexibility. Regular expressions format is the Perl regex format,
described here. The file
looks like "SIGGRAPH.*Conference on Sketches.*Applications" ACM SIGGRAPH Sketch
"ACM Transactions on Graphics" ACM Transactions on Graphics
"\d{4} ACM SIGGRAPH\s*/\s*Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation" Symposium on Computer Animation
If you don't want to worry about having these publication names appearing, simply provide an empty file for the venues list and they will be automatically dropped. --images-root-filesystem and --images-root-serverThe script generates copies of images in various sizes for things
like publication page icons, abtracts page images, and sidebar images.
We need to specify where this path is, both in terms of the www server
document root (e.g., --server-nameTo make the generated HTML shorter and cleaner, it makes sense to
provide relative URLs like coursesPagesThe courses pages look very similar to the publications pages, and the script shares a significant amount of code. However, BiBTeX doesn't make any sense for class descriptions, so I have instead substituted a simple (and mostly self-explanatory) XML format. Here is a sample of a "courses" file; the current complete <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<courses>
<course number="15-462"
name="Computer Graphics I"
description="Introduction to graphics, undergraduate level."
image="http://www.example.com/graphicsI/graphicsI_image.jpg">
<offering semester="fall" year="2004"
href="http://www.example.com/graphicsI_fall04/"
instructor="Jane Public" />
<offering semester="spring" year="2004"
href="http://www.example.com/graphicsI_spring04/index.html"
instructor="John Smith" />
</course>
</courses>
Basically, the file is divided into "courses" and "offerings", where
the course tag describes the basics of the course (number, description, image)
and specific offerings of each course are then listed. Note that
the file must be in valid XML format or Xerces will refuse to parse it; this
means that tags are case-sensitive and any "empty" element that doesn't
have a closing tag must use the special syntax Note that it doesn't matter what order courses and offerings are specified in as after they are read in they are automagically sorted by (1) most recent offerings and (2) course number (lowest numbers first). One major difference between the courses script and the publications script is that the courses page script makes no effort to resize images to fit; this is simply because course images change very slowly and it is therefore not an undue burden on the maintainer to make sure that images are appropriately sized. Most of the options are basically the same for the coursesPages script as for the pubsPages script. We will briefly go over the differences. --courses-fileA list of the courses in the XML format described above. --other-courses-fileIf you look at the current courses page, you will
notice that a list of additional courses appears at the bottom. Since this
appears on the index page but not on the descriptions page, it needs to
be separate from the standard footer, which is what the file specified
in Building the scriptsLibrary dependenciesThe scripts depend on the following libraries, all of which (except those
installed natively) are currently located in
Things to watch out forStyle sheetsAs much as possible, I have tried to separate the appearance of the pages from the actual HTML code that is generated. If you look at the generated code, it looks something like this: <div class="abstract" id="Biv:2008:rays"> <h2>Ray Tracing Really Fast</h2> <p>Roy G. Biv</p> <h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Amazing stuff is done here.</p> <h3>Citation</h3> etc. Things like class identifiers have been added to make it easier
to control appearance using style sheets. This makes the code cleaner,
faster to load, and more viewable on older browsers. If you want to
change the appearance of the generated pages, I suggest trying to accomplish
it by changing the style sheets rather than the actual generated HTML.
International charactersInternational characters like ć and č are handled differently
in HTML and in BiBTeX. The latter specifies them with an escape character,
as in "\'c", while the former requires that we specify special characters
in the format ć. Translating from the former to the latter is
just a lookup table, but I couldn't find any online, so to avoid having to
hand-generate it I added special cases for the ones that we see in our lab.
It may well be necessary to add more in the future. The function to look at
is |