[racket] Integrating scribble and LaTeX

Don, you're right. Latex is the assembly language here, 
and you should be able to patch in the results of an 
open compiler wherever you want. I did this kind of thing
all the time in my innocent youth (Pascal -> 6809 asm) and 
'it worked.' The reason it worked is because I (or perhaps
the mentor who showed me) lacked the imagination of doing 
more than pretty straightforward things. Matthew has provided
you with just enough for these scenarios. 

Eli, you're wrong. When people initially request such things
they don't think of all possible bad scenarios. Let them play 
with it. Most of the time, it may just work and it's what they
need. 

Eli, you're also correct. In principle, the latex linker is 
so impoverished that things will break sooner or later. And 
someone has already sent in a minor correction concerning the
ordering of files. BUT, the person could figure out the fix
and he was happy, so let it be. 




On Jun 23, 2011, at 6:17 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> Yesterday, Don Blaheta wrote:
>> It seems likely that at some point I might have wanted to shift over
>> to writing Scribble from scratch.  I may yet do that.  But it's
>> going to be a lot harder to make that decision if I can't first dip
>> in my toe and make it work with my existing installed base.  It's
>> especially hard if I'm not yet sure Scribble can do everything I
>> want it to and thus might be required to abandon the effort
>> half-done.  And it's not such a strange request (like "why can't
>> Scribble work with MS Word" would be), since LaTeX is *precisely
>> what Scribble generates*.
> 
> But the problem is exactly that it is latex -- a language where you
> can't include a whole document in some sane encapsulated way like:
> 
>  \newscope{\include{somefile}}
> 
> Instead, you need to merge the prefix and suffix requirements of both,
> which is never easy.  So while Matthew made it possible to get the
> parts separately from scribble, my guess is that if you have some
> non-trivial setup for your own latex, then it will be difficult to use
> it, or maybe even impossible.  (Given that some latex packages just
> don't work with others, leading to annoying breakages.)
> 
> It could probably generate more generic latex output, to the point
> where it could be embedded more conveniently in random latex files.
> It's probably even possible to just start from
> scribble/latex-render.rkt and slowly water it down.  But that would
> require a heavy cost in terms of lost typesetting features.
> 
> So I think that while Robby's suggestion to concatenate PDFs could
> sound like he was trying to avoid the question, it was really a good
> advice since PDFs are essentially these nice encapsulated chunks of
> text that you can easily glue together.
> 
> -- 
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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