Don Blaheta wrote:

I certainly don't expect that a feature be implemented just because I
want it, and even good features may take a while due to being low
priority or whatever.  And there may well be some technical impediment
to just creating a scribble.sty and working from there that I (a
newcomer to the scene) can't see yet.  But even if you're attempting
evangelism (and perhaps especially then), the correct answer to "How do
I X" should in general not be "You shouldn't even want to X, you should
Y instead".  This response feels a lot like the rightly-derided
responses of "install linux!" whenever anyone asked "how to I get
Windows to..." on certain message boards a few years back: unhelpful and
annoying.

I'm sorry if my response was unhelpful and annoying. I've only glanced at Scribble internals and I've only been scribbling for a few weeks, but it has gone fairly quickly for me. So let me try to be more helpful.

What would be the impediment to just \including a Scribble-generated LaTeX file in another? The generated file would use a bunch of macros that need to be defined, and would load a bunch of packages in the preamble. You need those macro definitions and those package declarations.

So, in an empty directory, create a file called empty.scrbl, with the single line:

#lang scribble/manual

Run:

scribble --latex empty.scrbl

Now look at empty.tex, which has been generated. Looking at machine-generated LaTeX, or even a human-written class file, can be a horrible experience, but this isn't at all bad. It's pretty easy to see what is in the preamble here and what should go in your preamble. The document body is almost empty: two hooks (\preDoc and \postDoc) that you can ignore, and a \label that you can probably ignore. So take everything from the first \usepackage to just before the \begin{document}, and save it in the file from-scribble.tex. Make sure your LaTeX document has \include from-scribble.tex in its preamble.

Then, for each example.scrbl written in Scribble, render it to LaTeX, open it up in an editor, strip off everything from the start to the \preDoc and \label commands, and from \postDoc to the end (last two lines), save it, and \include example.tex at the right spot in your document. (Warning: I haven't done this myself, since I haven't even had breakfast yet. Other stuff might break. But I doubt it, given my experience with writing my own prefix files for Scribble-generated LaTeX.)

You can see that the last bit is easily scripted, if you have lots of examples. And you can see that the feature you want shouldn't be too hard to include as an option to `scribble' on the command line, with some thought as to how that might be best achieved. But until then, you have a workaround that's not too bad, I think. --PR
_________________________________________________
 For list-related administrative tasks:
 http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users

Reply via email to