rvid.tex-runner 0.1.1

Utility functions for rendering XeLaTeX documents frmo Python

rvid.tex-runner

A small utility to ease programmatic usage of LaTeX from Python.

Calling XeLaTeX on output

If you just run the xelatex command, you'll get a bunch of temp files output to your current working directory.

The function rvid.tex_runner.make_pdf_at_path() finds the xelatex-command, creates a temp-directory, runs the command, moves the PDF-file into the location you specified and then cleans up all the temp files.

Handling paths to external resources

To handle external resources that are needed to build your PDF files, tex-runner has a concept of ExternalResource. This is a Python object that contains a sequence of absolute file paths and a relative target path (basedir) where your .tex files expect to be able to include them from. For example:

ExternalResource(
    basedir="images",
    files=[
        "/Users/sean.banan/tex/img1.png",
        "/Users/sean.banan/tex/img2.png",
    ]
)

This concept also comes in handy if you have differing paths in different deployment environments, since it allows you to abstract that away programmatically.

Auto-generating ExternalResource-libraries

There is a utility function for auto-generating ExternalResource-objects from filesystem paths:

>>> make_external_resource_library(source_directory="c:/pix", relative_target_directory="img")
ExternalResource(basedir="img", files=["c:/pix/q1.jpg"])

Debugging

Change rvid.tex_runner.latex:make_pdf_in_tempdir() so that it doesn't delete the tempdir after finishing the run.