django templates and tex/latex

[Ken]

I would like to write a tex/latex file with django tags in it.  Load it with the template loader and render it with a context.  The problem is that my tex/latex file has quite a few '{%' in them.   They are conventional in TeX for writing readable macros and are used to escape the newline.  I could try rewriting them but before I do, I thought I'd ask if this is even worth tackling.  TeX uses curly braces as grouping and percent signs as a comment. 

The TeX file would look rather confusing but the more important question is what the loader does when it sees braces and brace comments.  Is it possible to reassign the block and variable tags?

Thanks

[Tom Evans]

Nope. Well, of course, you can fork and change Django itself, but
there be many edge cases where

If you want to do this without changing Django, you would need to
replace all of TeX's curly braces - in fact, any of these strings
'{%', '%}', '{{', '}}', '{', '}', '{#' and '#}' - with "{% templatetag
'openblock' %}".

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/templates/builtins/#templatetag

Cheers

Tom

[Tom Evans]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Tom Evans <teva...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Ken <t...@anl.gov> wrote:
>> I would like to write a tex/latex file with django tags in it. Load it with
>> the template loader and render it with a context. The problem is that my
>> tex/latex file has quite a few '{%' in them. They are conventional in TeX
>> for writing readable macros and are used to escape the newline. I could try
>> rewriting them but before I do, I thought I'd ask if this is even worth
>> tackling. TeX uses curly braces as grouping and percent signs as a comment.
>>
>> The TeX file would look rather confusing but the more important question is
>> what the loader does when it sees braces and brace comments. Is it possible
>> to reassign the block and variable tags?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>
> Nope. Well, of course, you can fork and change Django itself, but
> there be many edge cases where
>

Damn:

… but there may be many edge cases where simply changing the tokens
where they are defined (django/templates/base.py) may not work
correctly.

Cheers

Tom

[Drew Ferguson]

I have done this in the past (with Plone rather than django) by calling a
python wrapper script to generate a file which latex can process;
essentially construct the Latex source as python strings
and have the script assemble the components you want. The objective was to
generate a PDF file by Latex with variables fed from SQL & a web page. But
this may not be what you are interested in.

Are you trying to render a Latex source document as a web page?

--
Drew

[Ken]

Actually, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.  I have database tables whose
columns contain TeX fragments.  I am trying to generate various file outputs
from database searches - TeX, pdf, etc.

I could construct the tex file on the fly with python strings as you suggest but
that's rather cumbersome.  It's simpler with a template.

I've also considered using the xml.element api to construct my own template
but that would set me back several weeks.  I'm trying to finish. :/

I have something that almost resembles a template.  It is not the most flexible
or elegant but it works.  I have a single replacement string between
\begin{document} and \end{document} and I simply replace this one token with a
string.replace()

[Bill Freeman]

Note that you don't have to use the Django template engine to render things.

For one thing, if you found a less problematic templating engine, using it as
well doesn't prevent you from using Django's template engine for other pages.

You could also roll your own by coming up with, for example, a TeX friendly
syntax for variable substitution (by which I mean, doesn't collide with syntax
that you will be using - best would be coming up with something that is
actually illegal in TeX), and process things with a big regex or had coded
parser..  You could parse this directly into the output, or this could be a
loading stage that converts the file to a Django template (or engine of your
choice) file, where the TeX/LaTeX stuff that looks like template specials is
converted to a quoted structure that renders as the original.

A final approach would be to use TeX definitions to perform your variable
substitutions, prepending a stanza that makes the definitions at render
time.  (Though making this work where you want template loops is much
harder.)

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[thanos]

I use the mako template  engine + TeX to generate all my pdf pages from a django app. It's works just fine.  Years ago for NYSE I wrote my own template engine that used just TeX markup, but it was just like so many other projects it dried up and died.

thanos