Mentionable ideas and projects in the digital space

Using MoinMoin Wiki on Mac OS X can be a little bit more elegant by using the Mac OS X launchd service. I wanted to start the MoinMoin standalone wiki server on my Mac only if I needed it – meaning I only want to start MoinMoin if I access a wiki page through my browser. So here lauchd comes in action. Detailled information on launchd and it’s PLIST-Format is given at the Apple website .It’s a service which combines standard UNIX services like crond, inetd and the init loading mechianism.

So how to achieve the automatic on-demand start-up of MoinMoin.

Open a console (Terminal) and create a launchd .plist File in one of the launchd startup directories:

sudo vim /Library/LaunchAgents/in.moinmoin.wikiserver.plist

The content of this file should be (assuming you extracted the MoinMoin archive to /Applications/moin):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>in.moinmoin.wikiserver</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/Applications/moin/wikiserver.py</string>
 </array>
 <key>Sockets</key>
 <dict>
 <key>MoinMoin</key>
 <dict>
 <key>SockFamily</key>
 <string>IPv4</string>
 <key>SockServiceName</key>
 <string>8080</string>
 </dict>
 </dict>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <false/>
 <key>OnDemand</key>
 <true/>
 <key>LaunchOnlyOnce</key>
 <true/>
 </dict>
</plist>

If you want to launch your configuration now (at next system startup it’s done automatically) just enter:

launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/in.moinmoin.wikiserver.plist

It’s essentially for aesthetics, even in an automatic generated technical documentation, to use typography and layout as you intended it. One fundamental topic are fonts.

In Apache FOP 1.0 a convenience feature for XSL-FO to PDF rendering was added: automatic detection and use of fonts. This can be fonts registered by the operating system or fonts lying in directories you point at by mentioning them in the FOP configuration file. But if you want to use the auto feature, you have to tell FOP to use your configuration file, even it’s the standard configuration in <fop directory>/conf/fop.xconf – often forgetting the -c parameter and wondering why your fonts are not detected costs endless hours.

To use costum-fonts just add the following (just one or both sections, as you need it) to your fop.xconf under the <fonts> node:

<!-- use fonts located in a special directory -->
<directory>/Library/Fonts</directory>

<!-- automatically detect operating system installed fonts -->
<auto-detect/>

Runnig the auto-detection font feature can result in a huge memory consumption by fop building it’s font cache file (~.fop/fop-fonts.cache). If you get the message: Exception in thread “main” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space – try this options (entered in a shell just before you start FOP or add this to the FOP start script):

export FOP_OPTS='-Xmx512m'

or if that doesn’t work, then

export FOP_OPTS='-Xmx1024m'