laml

A lame joke on LaTeX and HTML.

A bit of JS that converts a bunch of tags into something perhaps useful.

So what’s this?

A while ago, @scoskey asked @pkra got talking about authoring long form for the web when you have a LaTeX background.

@scoskey suggested that the key may be in the experience of having a text editor open (perhaps with a live preview side-by-side), writing somewhat raw code, having a bit of magic to transform said code into something nice, having the ability to modify existing transformations and adding your own.

@pkra claimed that this is not hard nowadays and @scoskey called him out on it.

This is the result.

Caveat emptor this is the result of a few hours.

Demo

Vince Vatter, An Erdős-Hajnal analogue for permutation classes” (source)

Example components

Some simple components

• helpers
  • renameTag to “rename” elements
• pre-processing
  • MathJax-conformant TeX pre-processing
  • CommonMarkJS pre-processing
• article header: via json or yaml
  • pick up yaml or json metadata
  • add a section, heading, and paragraphs with information
• abstract: <abstract>
• rename to <section> and add a class.
• theorem-environments via custom tag names (default: <theorem>, <lemma>, <proposition>, <corollary>, <proof>, customizable via metadata)
• select all suitable elements
• rename to sections and add suitable classes
• keep a counter for auto-numbering
• if no <name>, add heading with auto-numbering
• if <blame>, rename and add it
• figures via <figure>
  • if no <name>, add heading with auto-numbering
• generic heading via <name>
  • convert to heading and add class
• cross-references via <ref target=ID>
  • replace with <a> tags
  • look up target’s heading to populate <a>content with it (but strip <blame>)
• bibliographic citations via <cite target=ID>
  • for each bibitem in the bibliography
  • look up <cite> elements with target=ID of bibitem
  • populate <cite> with content and wrap link pointing to bibitem
• (foot)notes via <note>
  • create footnote-caller
  • add backlink from footnote to footnote-caller

TODOs

See the issues.

Getting started

• in-browser preview (e.g., while authoring HTML or laml itself)
  • create an HTML file in this folder
  • add <script src="dist/laml-browser.js"></script> to it
  • run npx reload -b -s YOUR.html
  • put newly opened browser window and editor with the HTML file side-by-side
  • just save the HTML to refresh the browser
• server-side conversion
  • Run $ node bin/mjextract input.html to generate a mathjax store (repeat whenever equations change)
  • Run $ node bin/laml.js input.html output.html
  • Open output.html
• when developing, it often helps to have automatic rebuilds and a server with live-reload
  • e.g., $ npm run live ./samples/vatter/vatter.html combines both of the above
• you can render to PDF via $ node bin/renderPDF input.html

Tips and tools

Some tools and training tips might help.

Learn Emmet

Emmet is a fantastic tool built into many text editors these days. Think of it as overpowered code snippets.

We strongly suggest learning it as it makes writing lots of HTML reasonable.