I really liked it because I have infinite layout control with LaTeX, and it’s a full blown programming language with if statements, operator overloading, functions, etc etc.
makes it really easy to have one source document that does different things when outputting to different formats.
I have added tooling so that I can get code listings into / out of the textbook that I'm writing so that I can easily and make sure that they work and produce correct code.
And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.
But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.
(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).
When I was working on my thesis, I had an appendix of annotated source code that was generated by a series of Julia macros that effectively turned my code inside out to make a LaTeX document. The custom macro-comments became the bulk of the LaTeX source, the code got wrapped in some environment that presented it with syntax highlighting and all that.
I was halfway through implmenting the syntax highlighting Vim plugin for the resulting Julia-LaTeX hybrid format when I realized that I had an actual deadline coming up, and just accepted solid-color LaTeX source.
I mean that honours the legacy of how TeX came to be - in spirit at least.
> This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth.[6] When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior. Disappointed, Knuth set out to design his own typesetting system. [1]
Do you have somewhere an article or similar about the motivation behind this project, i.e. how did you went from "I write a novel" to "I need to write my own editor to write my novel"? That would be really interesting!
Is there a word for the right amount of engineering? Kind of a negative concept of not engaging in performative conceptualization. Just doing it in a way that the implementation was natural and not worth writing home about.
I think there’s value in the concept of “an uninteresting amount”. When I cooked breakfast I used my stove and a pan and stuff and I put some seasoning on. Even though I enjoyed my morning routine, I’m unable to produce any fascinating trivia about the process or the result.
I finished a BSc and an MSc with quarto and fossil. It had to be in Word so I wrote a VBA script that pulled comments so I could edit my markdown files easier.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadI really liked it because I have infinite layout control with LaTeX, and it’s a full blown programming language with if statements, operator overloading, functions, etc etc. makes it really easy to have one source document that does different things when outputting to different formats.
Does seem like overkill but everyone scratches their own itch.
And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.
But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.
(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).
I was halfway through implmenting the syntax highlighting Vim plugin for the resulting Julia-LaTeX hybrid format when I realized that I had an actual deadline coming up, and just accepted solid-color LaTeX source.
> This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth.[6] When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior. Disappointed, Knuth set out to design his own typesetting system. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History
To write my hard sci-fi novel, I wrote a cross-platform Markdown editor so that I could use interpolated variables along with R code:
https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
Uses ConTeXt to produce PDF files. I also developed a few calculators to help confirm physics and other plot-related aspects:
https://autonoma.ca/calculators/
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...