TeX Parser Library

This code is highly experimental and still under construction. It comes with no guarantees, no warranties and is not future-proof. Note that version 0.8b has some file name changes. The most important one being the renaming of the former aux directory (see issue #1).

PURPOSE

My Java application MakeJmlrBookGUI needs to parse LaTeX files so that it can fix common problems. This mainly involves replacing obsolete/problematic code and removing .eps from included graphics, so that the book correctly compiles with pdflatex and my jmlrbook class. Unfortunately TeX syntax can be too complex for a regular expression. The texparserlib.jar library is not intended as a TeX engine, but as a way of parsing TeX code that's somewhat better than a simple pattern match.

Since TeX4HT no longer works with the jmlrbook class, I started to extend the TeX parsing code so that it could convert the article abstracts to HTML without requiring TeX4HT. This aspect is no longer required as JMLR W&CP now generate the HTML files from the .bib file associated with the proceedings, but the html part of the TeX parser library allows the translation of code fragments, such as author name or article title, so it can be rendered in Java's HTMLDocument, which makes the GUI look a bit tidier.

Since I have other Java applications (for example, datatooltk and bib2gls) that also need to parse LaTeX files or their associated .aux or .bib files, I decided to split away the TeX parsing code from MakeJmlBookGui into a separate library, namely texparserlib.jar. This also makes it easier to test the library without the additional overhead of the main program.

There are only a few LaTeX packages implemented and some of them aren't a full implementation. These are provided as some aspects of them are required for the applications using the texparserlib.jar library. For example, MakeJmlrBookGUI needs to convert articles that use the old jmlr2e package so that they instead use the new jmlr class, the datatooltk application can import probsoln data sets, and bib2gls needs to know symbols that commonly occur in glossary entries. So, for example, texparserlib.jar recognises siunitx's \si{} command as it's feasible that a user might want to define units used in the document, but it's less likely that a specific measurement might occur in the name field (although measurements may well occur in the description when defining constants, but that's less important to bib2gls since entries aren't usually sorted by their description).

The accompanying texparsertest.jar is a command line application provided to test the texparserlib.jar library. It's not intended for general use. (For this reason, I've renamed it from texparserapp.jar to texparsertest.jar. There is still a script called texparserapp in the bin directory which does the same thing as texparsertest.)

Syntax:

texparsertest [--html] --in <tex file> --output <out dir>

This parses <tex file> and saves the new file in <out dir> and copies over any included images. It will run epstopdf on any eps files and wmf2eps on any wps files. Both epstopdf and wmf2eps must be on your system path. The --html switch indicates conversion to HTML. If this switch is omitted, LaTeX to LaTeX conversion is assumed.

The output directory <out dir> must not exist. This is a precautionary measure to ensure you don't accidentally overwrite the original files.

I experimented with including a GUI to provide a way of testing the library with a graphical interface but I've now removed it as I don't have time to develop it, and it requires additional libraries.

TEST FILES

Test files are in src/tests/

Example 1:

The test file src/tests/test-obsolete/test-obs.tex contains obsolete commands such as \bf, \centerline and \epsfig.

cd src/tests
texparsertest --in test-obsolete/test-obs.tex --output output/test-obsolete

This will create the directory output/test-obsolete and create a file in it called test-obs.tex which is the original file with the obsolete commands replaced. The eps file is also copied over to the new directory and epstopdf is used to create a corresponding pdf file. The \epsfig command is converted to \includegraphics with the file extension removed.

Font changing commands, such as \bf, are changed to the corresponding LaTeX2e font declarations (such as \bfseries) in text mode and the corresponding LaTeX2e math font commands (such as \mathbf) in math mode. The commands are unchanged if they occur in the argument of \verb or in a command definition.

Example 2:

The test file src/tests/test-sw/test-sw.tex simulates output from Scientific Word. (I don't have SW so I can't test this. The code is based on the type of code I've had to work with as a production editor.) In general I don't want commands such as \bigskip in the articles, as the inter-paragraph spacing should be dependent on the book style. Also, I don't have tcilatex.tex used by SW, so texparserapp removes \input{tcilatex} and substitutes \FRAME and \Qcb. I don't know what other commands tcilatex defines. Those two are the only ones I've encountered so far. texparserapp also replaces \special{language "Scientific Word";...;tempfilename 'imgname.wmf'} with \includegraphics{imgname} and runs wmf2eps on the wmf image.

cd src/tests
texparsertest --in test-sw/test-sw.tex --output output/test-sw

This creates the directory output/test-sw and writes a copy of test-sw.tex with the relevant substitutions. The image file X0001.wmf is converted to eps and the eps file is then converted to pdf.

Example 3:

Conversion to HTML just creates a single HTML file. It's very limited as I initially only needed to convert abstracts to HTML. Images aren't supported. MathJax is used to render math mode.

cd src/tests
texparsertest --in test-article/test-article.tex --output output/test-article --html

The bib2gls application uses the HTML conversion without MathJax when trying to interpret the sort value when the sort field is missing, so this test file now includes some packages that have been added to help bib2gls. These are mostly packages that provide symbols that might appear in a glossary.