Org for developing LaTeX packages

Org for developing LaTeX packages

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi all,

I am writing a package for LuaLaTeX and have decided to use Org for it.
The reasons: org is more powerful, more versatile and more cool than the
'official' LaTeX literate programming utility, docstrip.

Searching for information on this list I found this post from Marcin
Borkowski, from 2013, where he comments on very interesting things
regarding these topic:

https://list.orgmode.org/20130311230246.4c629e36@aga-netbook/

Out of curiosity, I wonder if Marcin or someone else finally got around
to implementing something concrete for this. I think some kind of
extension to org-babel-tangle that would generate the typical docstrip
.dtx and .ins files might be nice. Perhaps this would open up the use of
Org to LaTeX package developers, though admittedly docstrip is deeply
rooted in planet LaTeX and hardly anything else is used.

When I release my package I'll write a makefile, in the style of the
wallcalendar package, which is also written in Org:

https://github.com/profound-labs/wallcalendar/blob/master/Makefile

BTW, Wallcalendar is the only LaTeX package I know of (besides mine,
still work in progress) that is written in Org and not in docstrip. I
don't know if there are any more...

Best regards,

Juan Manuel 

Re: Org for developing LaTeX packages

[Ihor Radchenko]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

> Out of curiosity, I wonder if Marcin or someone else finally got around
> to implementing something concrete for this. I think some kind of
> extension to org-babel-tangle that would generate the typical docstrip
> .dtx and .ins files might be nice. Perhaps this would open up the use of
> Org to LaTeX package developers, though admittedly docstrip is deeply
> rooted in planet LaTeX and hardly anything else is used.

I do not think that we need any extensions to org-babel-tangle for this.
AFAIU, appropriate export backend should be more suitable to generate
output that involves both code blocks and other org file elements.

Best,
Ihor