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Creating Gallery Pages

This README explains how to run the gallery.py script to regenerate the gallery .xml pages along with (optionally) the .png files.

The script gallery.py

The gallery.py script is used to generate the CIAO gallery pages.

It will

  • (optionally) run each command used to create the images to be displayed.
  • (optionally) run ds9 to create the images and run the imagemagick convert routine to create the thumbnails.
  • creates the .xml files for each of the separate gallery pages including the index.html and thumbnails.xml files.
  • create scripts that can be used with the SDS regression test suite, ie the .MAIN ksh files.

By default the script will use the config file gallery.cfg. It will always overwrite existing files.

Examples

The basic usage is

$ python gallery.py
...

This will parse the gallery.cfg in the current directory. It expects the required input data to be in the data sub-directory. It will write the output .xml files in the current directory and the .png files in the pngs sub-directory.

To publish the files you need to copy these files into the directories used by the publishing scripts:

$ cp pngs/*png ../pngs
$ cp *xml ../

User is responsible for making sure files have appropriate permissions.

There are three command line options

  • --skip-ds9 : do not run ds9 nor convert to create the PNG files.
  • --skip-run : do not actually run the commands needed to create the output files
  • --infile filename : use filename instead of gallery.cfg, useful when writing new examples

So if you want to just regenerate the xml files use

$ python gallery.py --skip-ds9 --skip-run

The config file gallery.cfg

The config file is a (gasp) Windows .ini style config file. Why? It's easy to parse and there is not a lot of need to escape special characters.

Feel free to convert to json or xml or yaml if you wish.

Each section should have the following keys, even if the values are blank:

[page.example.name]
title : 
requires : 
commands : 
outfile :
ds9_extras : 
pretext :
posttest :

[page.name]

The convention is that the section name will be a dotted name where the first string is used as the page name and section header.

Examples are numbers in the order present in the config file.

It's recommended that all examples that belong to the same page be grouped together.

requires

A space separated list of file names that the example assumes/requires already be present in the input data sub-directory before the commands are run.

This is also used when making the regression test scripts; it looks for them in $CT_INDIR directory.

provides (not shown)

This is not required and not used, but is present in many of the gallery.cfg examples.

commands

This is a list of the commands to run to generate the outputs for the example. You cannot continue an example onto a new-line, ie trailing back-slash does not work.

Multi-line commands are supported. Each command should be complete on a single line of text. Separate commands are specified with new-lines.

Note: Each command is run in a separate subprocess. So 
you cannot for example set environment variable or
shell variables since they only exist within the 
subprocess they were set.  Also things like 
for loops are discouraged since writing them as a single line is tricky.

All commands should have clobber=yes (or equivalent)

If any command fails (exits with non-zero status), the script will stop.

outfile

The space separated list of output files to display with ds9.

The script does not actually check that these files exist and some example extort this to add additional ds9 command line arguments interspersed with output file names.

ds9_extras

These are all the ds9 command line arguments needed to setup the ds9 display.

Users should clear their ds9 preferences. Things like
log scale and region formats may affect the outputs.

The actual ds9 command will look something like

ds9 ${outfile} ${ds9_extras} -saveimage png {filename} -exit

Most of the examples will have either --geometry %(geom_sqr)s or --geometry $(geom_wide)s. The geom_sqr and geom_wide are defined in the [DEFAULT] section of the config file and are used like macros.

When generating the text for the .xml files, the script will split ds9 commands longer than 150 characters onto multiple lines.

pretext

This is xml style text that will appear before the example image. This is the text that describes what the example is going to show and discuss things like non-default options.

The script does not validate the format of the text. The pages have to be published for the syntax of the text to be validated.

posttest

This is xml style text that will appear after the example and various commands. This describes the results; and for example in the case of multi-frame images is used to describe the contents of the frame.

The script does not validate the format of the text. The pages have to be published for the syntax of the text to be validated.

Tips

The only character that needs to be escaped in the config file is %, ie ten percent is 10%%.

When writing new examples it can be useful to put them into a separate config file and use the --infile filename option. This is because you cannot selectively run the commands, run ds9, nor generate the text for individual sections or pages.

Multi-line values are supported but the continued value must be indented, eg

pretext: <p>
    foo
    </p>

works, but

pretext:
<p>
foo
</p>

does not. Preceding white space is stripped by the config parser, so things like <syntax/> elements work just fine.