TexRocket

A basic template engine for LaTeX. Create dynamic documents by parsing JSON data and populating a custom template.

The script parses a template and fills it with data read from json files. Provide different json files to have multiple files with the same structure but varying content. Especially useful for translations.

Requirements

Make sure you have the following programs installed on your system before moving forward.

• python
• LaTeX

Installation

Easily install TexRocket by using pip

pip install texrocket

Usage

At any time you can run the texrocket script with the -h or --help flag to display usage information

usage: texrocket [-h] [-i INPUT_JSON] [-o OUTPUT_DIR] [-v] input_tex

Dynamic LaTeX generation from JSON, developed by Alberto Mosconi

positional arguments:
  input_tex             the LaTeX template file

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INPUT_JSON, --input-json INPUT_JSON
                        the JSON file or directory of files
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        the directory for the output files
  -v, --verbose         print verbose output and save LaTeX logs

An example using all possible arguments is

texrocket TEMPLATE.tex -i input.json -o out/ -v

This will create an out/ folder, with the documents generated using the TEMPLATE.tex template and the values inside input.json

out/
├── source/
│   └── TEMPLATE_input.tex
├── logs/
│   └── TEMPLATE_input.log
└── TEMPLATE_input.pdf

! All the JSON files MUST have the same structure, the engine will create multiple documents (one for each .json file) starting from TEMPLATE.tex.

The generated files have the following naming scheme

<TEMPLATE FILENAME>_<JSON FILENAME>.pdf

If the input JSON file is named main.json then this will not show up

<TEMPLATE FILENAME>.pdf

Syntax

Values

To display a certain JSON value reference it with the following syntax

<section.title>

{
  "section": {
    "title": "The section title",
    "text": "some text"
  }
}

The example above will be rendered as "The section title".

Loops

You can avoid repetition of LaTeX code by using loops, which can be nested

\begin{itemize}
  %startloop: first
  \item <name>
    \begin{itemize}
      %startloop: second
      \item <name>
      %endloop
    \end{itemize}
  %endloop
\end{itemize}

{
  "first": [
    {
      "name": "first main list item",
      "second": [
        { "name": "secondary list item" }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "second main list item",
      "second": [
        { "name": "secondary list item" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}