I cannot help more than Paul, but I'm glad you are prototyping a PDF export using LaTeX. I've been a LaTeX user for years and I have always loved the results. But it's a very different world than the other tools.
2018-02-15 8:46 GMT+01:00 Vincent Massol <[email protected]>: > Hi Paul, > > > On 15 Feb 2018, at 08:24, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hello Vincent, > > > > On 15 Feb 2018, at 7:25, Vincent Massol wrote: > >>> having some experience with TeX I would implement CSS with > macro-definitions… Every element start would be a call to a macro that > would check for rules that would apply to its element, including passing > parameters of their ancestry. > >> > >> Could you give an example of what you mean by macro-definitions? Is > this something that exist in TeX? > > > > Definitely. The complete TeX is based on macros. > > Basic macros are created using the \def macro. > > See e.g. http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-whatmacros.html > > > > Closer to the HTML world, there are the LaTeX environments. They are > nestable and extensible: see http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-whatenv.html > > > > This would be the way to create styles I think. > > Paths are not transported, as far as I know (would they be called maybe > environment stack?). That would need to be carried as an extra parameter > produced by the renderer. I would also think that recognising complex rules > with such as classes would need an amount of coding before the LaTeX is > processed. > > Very useful thanks. I think this is the same as what I was mentioning > using .sty files. You would put the defiinition of new > environments/macros/etc inside this .sty file and then have the XWiki > renderer output those new environments/macros, allowing the user to tune > the .sty file he/she wants to use to get the right styling. > > > > >>> However, I guess that your solution seems probably more ad hoc and > more practical. > >>> > >>> Is there any reason that you don’t use the XSL-FO renderer that use > LaTeX? I thought there were several of them. > >> > >> Do you have a pointer? As I said in my original mail I tried to search > for an XHTML to LaTeX converter/XSLT but couldn’t. If you know of one, I’ll > gladly have a look. > > > > The world is thinner than I thought. > > The closest I could find are the TEI renderers: > > http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-xsl/ > > https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-0/rahtz.pdf > > This seems like the TEI XML format is meant to be used as the input and > then transformed either to XHTML (web site) or to LaTeX/PDF for publishing. > Googling quickly I couldn’t find a XHTML -> TEI XSL stylehseet. > > > or DocBookLaTeX > > https://sourceforge.net/projects/dblatex/ > > This is interesting but we would need to have a proper DocBook renderer. > We have the start of one though but it would need to be improved a lot. > > I’m a bit way of going through too many intermediate tool chain as every > time you get some mismatch impedance that gets in the way. So I have the > feeling that for the best result/control the solution would be to directly > output LaTeX using custom XWiki environments/macros. > > If you don’t need this level of control, XWiki users should simply use the > PDF export. > > Now, I’ve just discovered TeX (typesetting engine) and LaTeX (“standard" > macros on top of TeX) yesterday so this is still new to me and I’m likely > to miss a lot of things at this stage :) > > Opinions are more than welcome! > > Thanks again for your help Paul, that’s great > -Vincent > > > > > paul > > > >>> > >>> On 14 Feb 2018, at 21:01, Vincent Massol wrote: > >>> > >>>> Hi devs, > >>>> > >>>> I’m currently working on improving our TeX renderer (which is really > a POC ATM), in an effort to see if it could be used to generate nice PDF > exports (you generate LaTeX and then you convert to PDF). > >>>> > >>>> The main issue is that LaTeX doesn’t have any technology for applying > style to it (like CSS has for HTML). In addition I wasn’t able to find any > good HTML+CSS to TeX converter (as we have for PDFs with XSLT+FOP). > >>>> > >>>> So right now my idea is to implement some default behavior in the Tex > Renderer (that could be configured globally in xwiki.properties and/or in > the Admin UI) and give the ability to override specifically in the content. > >>>> > >>>> For example, imagine that you need to decide how to position table > column content (left, centered, right) or whether the rows and/or columns > of your table have vertical and horizontal lines (or other configs, > autowrap, etc). > >>>> > >>>> The idea is that the Tex Renderer would support some custom > tex-specific parameters. For example: > >>>> > >>>> (% tex-table-spec=“c | c | c" tex-table-floating="true" > tex-table-caption="caption" %) > >>>> |=A|=B > >>>> (% tex-table-row-ending="\hline" %)|a|b > >>>> > >>>> (by default the table spec would be left aligned with vertical lines, > and rows would be separated by horizontal lines). > >>>> > >>>> If you have some comments or ideas, please let me know. > >>>> > >>>> Inventing a CSS-like mechanism would just be too hard to implement > IMO. > >>>> > >>>> Thanks > >>>> -Vincent > >>>> > >>>> PS: If you want to see table options in LaTeX, see > https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables > > -- Guillaume Delhumeau ([email protected]) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project
