Re: [xwiki-devs] [Brainstorming] LaTeX Renderer - Styling

Ok I’ve now realized that the 2 approaches mentioned so far are not going to work: * The first one mixes content and styling and is complex for the user to use * The second one is actually very limited and doesn’t allow full control of the LaTeX markup used So I’ve been thinking about a new approach that would both separate the content from the styling and at the same time allow full control of the produced LaTeX for perfect typesetting. The idea is: * Don’t provide a Listener for LaTeX in XWiki and instead only provide a BlockRenderer (i.e. no streaming generation of content). That’s the limitation. * For each XWiki Block object, provide a default LaTeX template that is called to generate the LaTeX content. * Allow Velocity in the LaTeX template and provide velocity tools + bind the passed Block to the $block variable. * For example for TableBlock: ---- start here ---- ## Compute the number of columns #set ($firstRowBlock = $blocks.getChildren().get(0)) #set ($columnSize = $firstRowBlock.getChildren().size()) #set ($tableSpec = "${stringtool.repeat("l|", $columnSize - 1)}l" \begin{tabular}{${tableSpec}} ## For all rows #foreach ($rowBlock in $blocks.getChildren()) ## for all cells #foreach ($cellBlock in $rowBlock.getChildren()) #processTemplates($cellBlock.getChildren()) & ## TODO: if last cell then output ""\\" #end ## TODO: if last row then don't output \hline \hline #end \end{tabular} ---- end here ----- * Users will be able to override the default templates for each Block * If the user wants to use a special template for a specific Block, define it using a “tex-template” parameter. For example: (% tex-template=‘customTemplateForThisTable’ %) |=A|=B |a|b * A template can set any variable in the VelocityContext so that templates downstream can access them. There are still details to iron out ofc. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent