New input format for Weave

[sebastianpech]

I recently wrote a kind of textbook/script for a lecture I'm giving this winter term and used Weave for that. The final form is a pdf, so we needed the TeX based conversion for that (That's the reason I made a few PRs recently). With a simple document, everything was fine. However, adding footnotes, bibliography, graphics made using Weave very difficult (if not impossible). Nevertheless, we found a way by doing some additional parsing and conversion after generation of the TeX files and the result looks quite ok. Yet, this got me thinking: Why not just write a LaTeX document and just replace julia code blocks there without using markdown?

So the idea is as follows. One could use a LaTeX document, similar to the TeX-template file, as an input for Weave. The code chunks could look something like that:

\begin{julia}[term=true, tangle=true]
function foo()
end
\end{julia}

Inline chunks could also be possible with something like \jl{foo()}. Those wouldn't be actual latex commands, but Weave replaces them with lstlisting, so the final document renders correctly. The stylesheet could be added with the Mustache.jl syntax or maybe to stay texy with \usepackage{Weave.jl} (which is also just a placeholder). Everything that's not a code chunk would be added as text and is basically just forwarded to the final document.

I'll pretty sure start developing that, it's more of a questions if that feature should resided in Weave or a separate package. Let me know what you think.

[BeastyBlacksmith]

What would be the difference to pythontex ( which dispite its name also supports execution of julia-code )? That is what have been used in Algorithms for Optimization

[sebastianpech]

I tried pythontex and had the following concerns:

• It's not as easy to setup as Weave
• I find the code generation mechanism of Weave more straightforward
• The sessions between term and standard code block are not shared. I posted and adaption of a workaround from pythontex (https://github.com/sisl/tufte_algorithms_book/issues/16). But it's not perfect.
• I think Highlights.jl provides a better syntax highlighting and more advanced lexer (eg. a newline in pythontex in a repl automatically switches the highlighting to output).
• From the perspective of a Julia user, it's easier to intervene in the process of code generation of Weave (mainly because, and that's my option, latex is just ugly to read)

On the other hand pythontex is the more latex like way to go as you don't generate a new set of tex files and the compile process is similar to eg. biblatex.

[mpastell]

You can currently use the noweb format to do that, there is quite old example document that shows the idea: https://github.com/JunoLab/Weave.jl/blob/master/examples/julia_latex.texw (syntax hasn't been updated since Julia 0.4 I think...).

You only need to add the correct regular expressions for the input format that you propose here: https://github.com/JunoLab/Weave.jl/blob/72e7ccfe8ac68c7dfc1ecd0c77b93de81cd5f3c0/src/readers.jl#L23 so I think that should go into Weave and I guess the template is also quite small addition.