Thaw

Thaw is a tool to create documents with export to PDF in a text-concentrated working style. It offers a feature-rich and easy to learn markup language that you can write your documents in a human-readable way.

Thaw is a prototype of a document layout engine and currently no more maintained. The successor Letter can be found at https://github.com/bennyboer/letter and is under active development.

Motivation

Current modern alternatives to TeX/LaTeX and its derivatives include WYSIWYG editors like DTP software that are usually very expensive (InDesign), hard to learn (LaTeX/TeX) or human-readable formats like Markdown that lack a lot of features (Math typesetting, Captions, ...). We want to improve the situation by proposing Thaw which lets you write your documents in a distraction-free and human-readable way while at the same time being easy to learn.

Since Thaw documents only consist of simple text files (except from images) you'll have no problems using Git or another version control software to version your document.

Example

Usually a Thaw document is defined by three files:

A text file (ending with *.tdt) - in some ways similar to Markdown - where you define the contents (text) of the document
A style file (ending with *.tds) - very similar to CSS - where you define the style of the document (page size, colors, fonts, ...)
A info file (ending with *.tdi) - a properties file - where you define the encoding of the project files, a bibliography to use, citation style, variables, ...

In the following we want to show some code snippets as well as the result taken from the Demo example in this repository under example/demo. Running the CLI with gradle (An executable version should be downloadable from the Releases page once there is a release) using the demo example files with ./gradlew.bat :cli:run --args="--root-folder='../example/demo' --output='../example/demo/demo.pdf'", we get the following PDF (Only a screenshot shown):

Check out the full PDF here.

Info file

The info file defines some info about the document.

encoding = UTF-8
language = en

bibliography.file = literature.bib
bibliography.style = apa

var.version = v0.1
var.author = Benjamin Eder

Style file

The style file is used to alter the document looks to your needs.

document {
	font-family: Cambria;
	inline-code-font-family: Consolas;

	font-size: 13pt;
	color: #222222;

	width: 210mm;
	height: 297mm;

	margin: 2cm 3cm;
}

/* ... */

Text file

The text file defines the contents and the structure of the document.

#TITLE# Thaw Demo

For demonstration purposes we show some of the features *Thaw* has to offer.
We begin with a table of contents that is simply included in the text file with `#TOC#`.
The table of contents will be automatically generated from the present headlines.

#TOC#

#H1# Images

Most likely when you create a document you will have something like charts or other images - depending on the document type - that you want to display.
As an example you can see a bird I took a picture of a while ago in #REF, bird-image, prefix=Image#.

#IMAGE,
src="res/bird.jpg",
caption="This is an image of a bird. I don't know which kind, since I am hardly an ornithologist. But it is fun to take pictures of those animals!",
label=bird-image
#

...

Documentation

We are currently trying to establish a documentation for the project that specifies all available features and how to use them. In the meantime you can check out the demo example project at example/demo.

Contributing

I'd be glad if you want to contribute to the project. If you're interested write a message to me via email (See my GitHub profile).

Project structure

The project is organized in multiple modules that each take care of a specific part of the application:

Module name	Folder	Description
CLI	`/cli`	Command-line interface for the Thaw project
Core	`/core`	The core module containing the document model.
Text	`/text`	Text file parsing and model.
Style	`/style`	Style file parsing and model.
Reference	`/reference`	Reference file parsing and model.
Info	`/info`	Document information (meta data, etc.) and model.
Typesetting	`/typeset`	Code related to typesetting a document.
Export	`/export`	Related to exporting a document (for example to PDF).
Font	`/font`	Helps dealing with fonts.
Hyphenation	`/hyphenation`	Module dealing with hyphenating individual words.
Plugin	`/plugin`	Plugin development resources.
Shared	`/shared`	Some shared classes.
Math	`/math`	LaTeX to MathML converter + MathML typesetting.
Util	`/util`	Some useful module-spanning utilities.
Code	`/code`	Dealing with syntax highlighting code.
Table	`/table`	Table-related logic (Table model dealing with cell spans).

bennyboer/thaw