Automating Miktex using Python, win32com on Windows

I downloaded the Latex Miktex implementation yesterday with the goal of starting to learn to write Latex code. Unfortunately my roving eye caught the words "SDK" and off I went figuring out how to externally connect to and tinker with Mitex. When I found it used COM, i was even more excited, having tinkered with COM and VirtualBox recently.

This was extra fun since I had wanted to see how to do all this using Python for some time now. Mark Hammond's excellent win32com Python extension makes it super easy to write COM clients using Python .

After some experimenting around, i was able to write the Python equivalent of a couple of the C++ samples provided by the Miktek SDK.

STEPS :

# Install Python Win32 Extensions from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/

# Build COM library specific to MiKTeX.Session

1. C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\win32com\client\makepy.py

2. Select "MiKTeX.Session" in the list presented.

makepy.py writes out the relevant files to the Python installation.


CODE : (Save as a Python file / just type in at the IDLE prompt)

import win32com.client as w

# instantiate COM library
c = w.Dispatch("MiKTeX.Session")
path = ''

# Calling Findfile
print c.FindFile("xunicode.sty", path)
(True, u'C:\\Program Files\\MiKTeX 2.7\\tex\\xelatex\\xunicode\\xunicode.sty')

# Getting installation information
print c.GetMiKTeXSetupInfo().installRoot
u'C:\\Program Files\\MiKTeX 2.7'

print c.GetMiKTeXSetupInfo().commonConfigRoot
u'C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data\\MiKTeX\\2.7'


# Calling FindPkFile
print c.FindPkFile('cmr10', 'ljfour', '600')
(True, u'C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data\\MiKTeX\\2.7\\fonts\\pk\\ljfour\\public\\cm\\dpi600\\cmr10.pk')


Now back to learning Tex !

UPDATE : I fixed several typos that made the above code almost unusable. Should work now.