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About
What it is
Batch Commander is an application designed to provide graphical user interfaces for manipulating text files. Its main purpose is to enable visual control of styling elements in TeX and PovRay documents, but it can be extended to command any other application that takes text files as input.
Batch Commander was developed by Dr. Kaveh Bazargan with the purpose of visually editing TeX/LaTeX and PovRay documents. These programs both take text files as input, and there are cases where a graphical user interface is desirable to be able to freely tweak and experiment with different values.
The original Batch Commander was developed in HyperCard, a programming environment by Apple that was discontinued. It was rewritten by Ricardo Lafuente using Python and the Qt Toolkit.
How it works
Batch Commander reads one or more data files, which describe the GUI elements that should be shown to the user, as well as the commands that they should alter. From there, it will read the user input and generate a text file accordingly, which will then be used to render the final result.
The current version of Batch Commander only works with TeX files. Batch
Commander will create .sty files and render the document using pdflatex.
Further reading
You can read the original TUGboat paper by Kaveh Bazargan outlining Batch Commander in PDF or converted HTML.