(almost) murphy.de - Fabrik: Textile and LaTeX

Thu 2009-04-23 ( En pr )

TeX is much to complicated for me, especially when it comes to simple text – I prefer the simplicity of Textile. But when it comes to typesetting formulas, there’s no real alternative.

So I’m trying to combine them, with this little Ruby script which runs on Leopard and uses latex2png:

require 'redcloth'

TEX_PATTERN = /\$(\$)?(\{[^\}]+\})?(\S[^\$]*)\$\$?/
QUALITY = 1

math_textile = ARGF.read

IMAGE_PREFIX = 'temp'
TEX_TEMPLATE = <<'TEX_DOCUMENT'
\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}  % math...
\usepackage{pxfonts}  % \mathbb
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}  % no page number
<TEX>
\end{document}
TEX_DOCUMENT

def generate_image tex, image_file_name
  File.open image_file_name + '.tex', 'w' do |file|
    file.puts TEX_TEMPLATE.sub('<TEX>', tex)
  end
  `latex2png -s #{115 * QUALITY} #{image_file_name}.tex`
  `rm #{image_file_name}.tex`
end

textile = math_textile.gsub(TEX_PATTERN) do
  big, styles, tex = $1, $2 || '{}', $3
  if big
    tex = "\\[#{tex}\\]"
  else
    tex = "$#{tex}$"
  end
  image_file_name = "temp-#{tex.hash.%(2**32).to_s(16)}"
  unless File.exist?(image_file_name + '.png')
    generate_image tex, image_file_name
  end
  width = `file #{image_file_name}.png`[/(\d+) x /, 1].to_i
  styles.sub!('{', "{vertical-align: middle; width: #{width / QUALITY}px; ")
  "!#{styles}#{"file://#{Dir.pwd}/" if ENV['TM_FILEPATH']}#{image_file_name}.png(#{tex.tr '()', '[]' })!"
end

puts RedCloth.new(textile).to_html

Here’s an example input and output, and a TextMate Command.

I call it “Fabrik” (German for factory), because it sounds like fabric, a synonym for textile.

^(almost) murphy.de

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