Mistex

A common criticism of LaTeX is that its syntax is outdated and cumbersome, in a way that gets in the way of your thoughts while writing. Additionally, it leaves many auxiliary files around, which is annoying when you want to write a quick-and-dirty note.

Conversely, markdown has a very lightweight syntax that is designed to be easy to read even without compilation into a graphical document, but is far less powerful.

Mistex is a simple tool for cross-compiling markdown code into LaTeX, with the peculiarity that markdown and LaTeX syntax can be freely mixed in your source file. Using it, you will be able to write markdown and turn it into a LaTeX-style PDF document. If you need the full power or LaTeX, you can simply use a little bit of markdown as syntactic sugar in your LaTeX source instead. You will never have to type \textbf, \begin{enumerate} \item ... \end{enumerate} and the like again.

Mistex is based on the markdown compiler mistune, but should not be considered endorsed by its author, who retains copyright on the code derived from it (please see LICENSE.md).

Mistex

Understanding mistex

To understand what mistex does, consider the following edge cases:

If mistex is called on any LaTeX source file, it should do nothing and output the same file (bugs notwithstanding).
If mistex is called on any Markdown file, it will cross-compile it into LaTeXcode and, optionally, compile the latter into a PDF. All the syntax listed by the markdown guide is supported, and more, if the best practices therein are respected. The only unexpected things can happen if your markdown document contains symbols that have a special role in LaTeX,such as &, \, % (and possibly others). These will have to be escaped as\&, \backslash and \% respectively.

Examples

Installation

Requirements

A working Python 3 installation. In the commands below, change python to python3 and pip to pip3 if the default for your system is python 2.
A sufficiently complete LaTeX installation, which includes latexmk and xelatex. You won't need this if you're only interested in cross-compiling markdown to latex.

Installing with pip

git clone https://github.com/martinosorb/mistex.git
cd mistex
pip install --user .

NOTE: mistex requires mistune>=2.*. This unfortunately conflicts with other packages, such as nbconvert (used by jupyter), which use mistune version 0.8.*. If you experience problems, you should consider using virtual environments.

Usage

The purpose of mistex is to pre-compile your markdown file (or mixed LaTeX-plus-markdown) into a pure LaTeX file that can later be compiled to PDF. To do this, use:

python -m mistex my_file.md [--out my_out_file.tex]

(where the part in square brackets is optional, in case you want a custom output name or location).

Mistex can be used to quickly compile a LaTeX file into a pdf using xelatex and latexmk. It will take care of the auxiliary files (putting them into a separate directory), and will leave you with a clean PDF. To run mistex followed by the latex compilers, use:

python -m mistex --pdf my_file.md [--out my_out_file.pdf]

(again the part in square brackets is optional).

Note that auxiliary files are saved in a separate directory. By default, this is a folder called latex_cache/your_input_filename, placed in the output directory. If your file contains sensitive information, when you're done compiling, you may want to remove it. You can choose a custom cache directory with --cachedir mydir.

Usage within TeX IDEs

TeXShop on Mac OS X

This was not thoroughly tested, but works for me:

First, check that your TeXShop directory is ~/Library/TeXShop/. If not, change the path in the command below.
You can then issue the following command to generate a new "engine" file:

echo "#\!/bin/bash\n$(which python) -m mistex --pdf \"\$1\"" > ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/mistex.engine

This should create a file in the Engines directory of TeXShop, containing the mistex command. If you use a virtual environment, make sure it is active while you do this (which python needs to give the correct result). If you use pyenv-virtualenv, use pyenv which instead of which.

Now, open TeXShop again. You should see mistex among the list of LaTeX commands (in the drop-down menu together with LaTeX, BibTeX, etc.). Select it, and compile your file.

Feedback on this is welcome.