Status of the Project @ 2021-02-27

Hello everyone!

Small update on the status of the project, mostly on how things are going.

Like the best of potatoes, I'm working "underground" to adapt the project to be easier to contribute to, as well as more flexible to allow for an EPub edition, and things are going both better and worse than I expected.

The "Better"

GladTex is working really well in translating Math into SVG images that can be included, as you can see from the following screenshot:

Sadly I didn't get around to work on the Vector PDF images yet, but all PNG and JPG images are imported correctly. You can also see a preliminary version of the EPub "Pitfall Box" (without the image).

I have also been working towards removing as much LaTeX as possible from the documents, which made me transition from "PdfLatex" to the "XeLaTeX" engine, which supports Unicode natively. XeLaTeX is part of TeXLive now, and transitioning to this engine shouldn't be an issue.

The "Worse"

I really wanted to make a "universal front matter" that would work for both formats, but it seems I will have to integrate it into the HTML template to have a decent result, or in this case a result at all. Pandoc doesn't "render" anything but the "document body", so anything imported with "--include-before-body" will be thrown in there "Verbatim". This means the current version is missing its front matter and will not be published yet.

Also I didn't get to work on the dynamic code listings, which you can see missing in the screenshot below:

I was looking for finding a solution that would allow me to easily include dynamic code listings, maybe via a filter, but all the examples I found online have a clunky syntax (like an empty "fenced Div" with attributes).

Other issues come from "epigraphs", the quotes I put at the beginning of every chapter, those are not visible yet, since their LaTeX code is ignored at the moment (much like the `\code` syntax).

I still have no idea on how I will remove some of the "pure LaTeX" tables I made, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Conclusion

All things considered, the work towards an Epub release is going well and I should be able (given I still have energy after work) to get back to adding content soon enough.

Thank you for reading!

Penaz