Comments on: wiki_tex.py

By: Michael Nielsen

Michael Nielsen — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:46:43 +0000

Nice one, John. As you say, every little bit of automation helps. With my workflow I probably wouldn’t use this, but someone doing a great deal of LaTeX-wiki might find it helpful. Another way of getting a similar effect would be through a simple shell script which combined LaTeX and wiki_tek steps.

By: wiki_tex.py « Quang Phuc’s Weblog

wiki_tex.py « Quang Phuc’s Weblog — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:08:04 +0000

[...] wiki_tex.py wiki_tex.py [...]

By: John Sidles

John Sidles — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:21:03 +0000

Hmmmm … some key characters were stripped out of the above post; it should have read:

“A LaTeX idiom that works nicely with your script is ‘\immediate\write18{}’, which immediately executes .”

I hope people have fun with this … it has been my experience that literate programming becomes a lot more enjoyable (and practical too) when typesetting, compiling, testing, packaging … and now blogging and wiki-ing too! … is a one-click process.

By: John Sidles

John Sidles — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:06:48 +0000

Dear Michael

Thank you for the fine code!

A LaTeX idiom that works nicely with your script is “\immediate\write18{}”; which immediately executes (provided, that is, that the LaTeX compiler has been invoked with the “–shell-escape” option).

A simple LaTeX example is wiki_tex_example.tex, which (on my OS X system) runs your python conversion script directly from the LaTeX source file.

All you fans of literate programming will appreciate that \write18 allows “pdftex” to run “make” (and therefore, any other program or script) as easily as “make” runs “pdftex”.

The result is nearly-infinite flexibility in creating one-step literate programming environments that have all the nice graphical interfaces that we associate with LaTeX … Nirvana!