[racket] Integrating scribble and LaTeX

Nicely summarized, Matthias.

To follow-up on Robby's suggestion and my own petty needs, is there a way to get scribble to generate a "minimal pdf", instead of a whole page?

For instance, from the following code:

#lang scribble/manual
@(require scribble/eval)
@def+int[
(define add 
 (λ (n)
   (λ (m)
     (+ m n))))
(define add2 (add 2))
(add2 5)
]

can I get a correct-size pdf to include (as a figure) in a latex document?

I guess I'm asking for the --pdf equivalent of --latex-section. 

That would then address my need directly (including nice looking scheme code in papers), without going into the (indeed) hairy issues with latex.

-- Éric


On Jun 23, 2011, at 6:28 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> 
> 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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