Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
75 lines (64 loc) · 3.53 KB

DESIGN.md

File metadata and controls

75 lines (64 loc) · 3.53 KB

Design Specifications for TeXControl

Here, we discuss some key requirements and features for the program as well as the high-level design of the program.

Language

  • Chapter: a subdirectory in the project directory that represents an independent TeX project. It can be compiled indepedently. Many of these chapter may form an entire project.
  • Tag: a label for a chapter which users can use to group chapters together.
  • Linking: connecting chapters together to make an aggregate .tex file.

Minimum Viable Product

  • The user should be able to create subdirectories that represent a chapter.
    • Each chapter shall be created with a template that can be specified by the user. It should also contain a static folder to hold images as well as any .sty files.
  • Users should be able to add tags and remove tags.
  • Tags should be self-contained within each chapter directory.
  • Users should be able to link chapters together into one main .tex file based on a mixture of tags and individual chapter names.
    • When users link chapters together, if individual chapters contain static files, they should be aggregated into a main static directory at the root.
    • Chapters will be organized in alpabetic order.
    • Each chapter will represents a chapter in the main.tex document.
  • Users should be able to view all the tags in a given directory.

Inputs and Commands

In this subsection, we describe some of the commands and their syntax.

Creating a new project

txctrl project [projectname]

This will create a new directory with the name projectname, then it will initialize the data structures needed for compilation. These are explained in the following subsection.

Creating a new chapter

txctrl create [filename] [title] [template] [tag1] [tag2] [tag3] ...

Here, we note that it is acceptable for no tags to be provided. However, a filename (filename for the new document, also the name of the subdirectory), a title (title of the newly created document) as well as template (template for the newly created .tex file) must be specified.

Viewing all tags

txctrl viewtags [chpt filename]

Here, we note that if the name of a chapter is given, then this command will only display the tags in this chapter. Otherwise, it will show the users all tha tags in the project.

Linking

txctrl link -tags [tag1] [tag2] [tag3] ... -chpt [chpt1] ..

Either the tags for the desired files must be provided or the chapters. They may also be provided simultaneously. If multiple tags are provided, then only the chapters with the intersection of these tags will be linked. The -chpt flag allows the user to specify specific chapters that the user wishes to be linked.

Data Structures

  • We use a map to store chapters/files associated with a particular tag. This data structure will be pickled and stored in a .txctrl subdirectory in the project directory.
  • Tags are included into chapter subdirectories through hidden files: .<tagname>.

High-Level Pseudocode for Linking

  1. Find all of the chapters of interest. This includes filtering the chapters by their appropriate tags as well as including manually included chapters.
  2. Copy all of the static files into subdirectories in the main static diretory.
  3. Build the dependency list of the main.tex file by scanning the preamble of each chapter.
  4. Then we simply build the main file by copying all the contents of each chapter into the main.tex file and number of these chapter using the \chapter{} organizational environment.