unified-latex

Monorepo for @unified-latex packages.

These packages provide a JS/TypeScript interface for creating, manipulating, and printing LaTeX Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs).

Most of the action lies in the

• packages/ directory, where you'll find plugins for Unifiedjs and standalone tools for parsing LaTeX to an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). Though parsing LaTeX isn't possible since it effectively has no grammar, unified-latex makes some practical assumptions. It should work on your code, unless you do complicated things like redefine control sequences or embed complicated TeX-style macros.

How it works

unified-latex uses PEG.js to define a PEG grammar for LaTeX. LaTeX source is first parsed with this grammar. Then it is post-processed based on knowledge of special macros. (e.g., some macros are known to take an argument, like \mathbb. Such arguments are not detected in the PEG processing stage).

Development

You should develop in each project's subfolder in the packages/ directory. These packages are set up as npm workspaces.

If you have node.js and npm installed, run

npm install

in this (the root) directory. Then -- after doing a full build as explained below first! -- you may build any particular package (for example)

cd packages/unified-latex
npm install
npm run build

Building

Building is a two-stage process. esbuild is used to create bundled packages in the esm and commonjs formats. Secondly, the TypeScript compiler is used to create the needed type information. All compiled files are stored in the dist/ directory of a workspace.

To build code for all workspaces, run

npm run build -ws

from the root directory.

If typescript complains about imports not existing in rootDir, it probably means that there is not a TypeScript reference to that particular workspace. (References are how typescript divides projects into different pieces so that it doesn't need to recompile every project). Add the imported project to the "references" field of the tsconfig.json.

Note that all tsconfig.json files extend tsconfig.build.json, which has some special configuration options to forward imports of @unified-latex/... directly to the correct folder during development.

Testing

Tests in a specific workspace can be run via npx jest in that workspace. These for the whole project can be run via npm run tests in the root directory.

Readme Generation and Consistency

README.md files for all workspaces are generated automatically by running

npx esr scripts/build-docs.ts

package.json files can be checked for naming consistency by running

npx esr scripts/package-consistency.ts

Publishing

Version management is done with lerna. Run

npx lerna version

to update the version of all packages. Run

npm run package
npm run publish

to publish all workspaces.

Playground

You use the Playground to view how latex is parsed/pretty-printed. To run your own version, visit the playground repository, and make a local clone. After running npm install, run npm link in your local latex-parser repository. Then, run npm link latex-ast-parser in the local playground repository. This will mirror your development version of latex-parser in the playground.

Related Projects

• Some code was borrowed from Michael Brade's LaTeX.js project https://github.com/michael-brade/LaTeX.js
• Prettier is a code-formatting library https://prettier.io/