Grievous annoyances

[pheloniusfriar]

I am back to wrangling with Mentor Graphics' HDL Designer (version 2015.1 so I am aligned with the group in the UK I'm supposed to be working with) and Xilinx's FPGA tools (I'm building a bare-bones DAQ/ASIC test system with nothing but stone knives and bear skins, a PSoC board, and an FPGA development system). Step 1: access the HDL Designer documentation. Seems simple, right? PDF? Just open the files? Nope. Not simple at all. Nearly impossible, in fact, and requiring a poor opinion of software developers to figure out. There is a facility in the program to associate file types (e.g. PDF) with a "task" (e.g. launching a PDF reader); however, this only applies to files associated with projects and not the built-in documentation for the program (i.e. any context Help button, the built-in manuals, etc.). That, it seems, is hardcoded in the binary to use "acroread" to launch. How did I guess this? I ran "strings hdldesigner | grep acroread" because it was the stupidest thing I could have imagined the developers doing. Yup... there is was... so I wrote a little script called "acroread" that just invoked "evince" and put it in /usr/local/bin, restarted HDL Designer and I have access to the program's documentation. I have nothing polite to say. The script, is simply:

#/bin/bash
/usr/bin/evince $*
exit $?

I also have nothing polite to say about how Adobe failed to offer support for Linux platforms with their tools, forcing us to turn to half-baked solutions like Evince to read PDFs (I have no end of grief with this program, but it comes with most Linux distros... I'm running CentOS 7, which has a raft of other issues, because it is the officially supported distro at CERN that much of my work is directed toward). And don't get me started on the "built in" PDF viewers in browsers and their hostility to the Adobe plugins. I agree on some levels that there were serious issues with having a commercial product being so important to accessing information on the Internet, but give me the choice of what I want to use and I can decide on my very own thank you very much.

Anyway, finding a workaround for the HDL Designer decisions around PDFs shot down pretty much any productivity I had hoped to have this afternoon at work. Perhaps tomorrow, I can do something productive (although it is going to be testing the integration between HDL Designer and Xilinx ISE, so something tells me I'll be pounding my head on the desk repeatedly seeking relief from the pain I will be putting myself through with the tools... heh).