[racket] Integrating scribble and LaTeX

Don Blaheta wrote:

> I certainly don't expect that a feature be implemented just because I
> want it, and even good features may take a while due to being low
> priority or whatever.  And there may well be some technical impediment
> to just creating a scribble.sty and working from there that I (a
> newcomer to the scene) can't see yet.  But even if you're attempting
> evangelism (and perhaps especially then), the correct answer to "How do
> I X" should in general not be "You shouldn't even want to X, you should
> Y instead".  This response feels a lot like the rightly-derided
> responses of "install linux!" whenever anyone asked "how to I get
> Windows to..." on certain message boards a few years back: unhelpful and
> annoying.

I'm sorry if my response was unhelpful and annoying. I've only glanced 
at Scribble internals and I've only been scribbling for a few weeks, but 
it has gone fairly quickly for me. So let me try to be more helpful.

What would be the impediment to just \including a Scribble-generated 
LaTeX file in another? The generated file would use a bunch of macros 
that need to be defined, and would load a bunch of packages in the 
preamble. You need those macro definitions and those package declarations.

So, in an empty directory, create a file called empty.scrbl, with the 
single line:

#lang scribble/manual

Run:

scribble --latex empty.scrbl

Now look at empty.tex, which has been generated. Looking at 
machine-generated LaTeX, or even a human-written class file, can be a 
horrible experience, but this isn't at all bad. It's pretty easy to see 
what is in the preamble here and what should go in your preamble. The 
document body is almost empty: two hooks (\preDoc and \postDoc) that you 
can ignore, and a \label that you can probably ignore. So take 
everything from the first \usepackage to just before the 
\begin{document}, and save it in the file from-scribble.tex. Make sure 
your LaTeX document has \include from-scribble.tex in its preamble.

Then, for each example.scrbl written in Scribble, render it to LaTeX, 
open it up in an editor, strip off everything from the start to the 
\preDoc and \label commands, and from \postDoc to the end (last two 
lines), save it, and \include example.tex at the right spot in your 
document. (Warning: I haven't done this myself, since I haven't even had 
breakfast yet. Other stuff might break. But I doubt it, given my 
experience with writing my own prefix files for Scribble-generated LaTeX.)

You can see that the last bit is easily scripted, if you have lots of 
examples. And you can see that the feature you want shouldn't be too 
hard to include as an option to `scribble' on the command line, with 
some thought as to how that might be best achieved. But until then, you 
have a workaround that's not too bad, I think. --PR