I have added tooling so that I can get code listings into / out of the textbook that I'm writing so that I can easily and make sure that they work and produce correct code.
And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.
But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.
(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).
Is there a word for the right amount of engineering? Kind of a negative concept of not engaging in performative conceptualization. Just doing it in a way that the implementation was natural and not worth writing home about.
I think there’s value in the concept of “an uninteresting amount”. When I cooked breakfast I used my stove and a pan and stuff and I put some seasoning on. Even though I enjoyed my morning routine, I’m unable to produce any fascinating trivia about the process or the result.
I finished a BSc and an MSc with quarto and fossil. It had to be in Word so I wrote a VBA script that pulled comments so I could edit my markdown files easier.
I built Mark2TeX while writing my thesis in Obsidian. I wanted to write the prose in Markdown, but keep a normal LuaLaTeX document for math, citations, cross-references, etc.
So Mark2TeX lets me use Markdown-like files and drop into real LaTeX whenever I need it.
I deliberately didn't try to build a complete Markdown/Pandoc replacement. It's basically an attempt to under-engineer the Markdown/LaTeX boundary.
Does seem like overkill but everyone scratches their own itch.
To write my hard sci-fi novel, I wrote a cross-platform Markdown editor so that I could use interpolated variables along with R code:
https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
Uses ConTeXt to produce PDF files. I also developed a few calculators to help confirm physics and other plot-related aspects:
https://autonoma.ca/calculators/
And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.
But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.
(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).
https://github.com/simonschnake/Mark2Tex
I built Mark2TeX while writing my thesis in Obsidian. I wanted to write the prose in Markdown, but keep a normal LuaLaTeX document for math, citations, cross-references, etc.
So Mark2TeX lets me use Markdown-like files and drop into real LaTeX whenever I need it.
I deliberately didn't try to build a complete Markdown/Pandoc replacement. It's basically an attempt to under-engineer the Markdown/LaTeX boundary.