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

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