haha seems there’s some option to use “.sty” files for styling in LaTeX! :) * https://tug.org/pracjourn/2005-3/asknelly/nelly-sty-&-cls.pdf * https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/91167/why-use-sty-files What I understand so far, is that we would redefine commands in the .sty file and then use those commands in the generated tex output. For example instead of directly outputing "\begin{tabular}{l|ll}” for a table, we would create own own and output "\begin{xwiki}{l|ll}”, with the definition of it in a .sty file, with some default styles applied. This would then allow modifying just the .sty file to control the output. Seems great and exactly what I need. Still digging. Also this page explains nicely the differences between LaTeX and PDF: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.text.tex/oTaAExhAZE4/4zbqNDYUwg8J Thanks -Vincent
On 15 Feb 2018, at 07:25, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Paul,
On 14 Feb 2018, at 23:14, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Vincent,
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?
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.
Thanks a lot! -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