YAST

Yet Another Scripting Tetorial tex build. Uses Tex Live and Pygment.

Installation

The following assumes you are using Linux or WSL via Ubuntu or Debian.

Update apt.

sudo apt update

Ensure that you have Python installed.

sudo apt install python3

For convenience you may want:

sudo apt install python-is-python3

If you have Python 3.12 or later, you may also need (or equivalent):

sudo apt install python3.12-venv

Install Tex Live (~8 GB for everything).

You could be more selective if you want.

sudo apt install texlive-full

Install pygments plugin.

python -m venv venv/
venv/bin/pip install .

If you update the plugin, you need to reinstall it.

Configure your environment

I recommend using VS Code with LaTeX Workshop plugin. This will let you auto-compile the output file on save.

In your VS Code settings.json, add the following configurations to the root object. The -shell-escape option is very important.

"latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
    {
        "name": "latexmk (shell escape)",
        "command": "latexmk",
        "args": [
            "-synctex=1",
            "-shell-escape",
            "-interaction=nonstopmode",
            "-file-line-error",
            "-pdf",
            "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
            "%DOC%"
        ],
        "env": {
            "PYGMENTIZE": "path/to/project/venv/bin/pygmentize"
        }
    }
],
"latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
    {
        "name": "latexmk (shell escape)",
        "tools": [
            "latexmk (shell escape)"
        ]
    }
],
"latex-workshop.latex.recipe.default": "latexmk (shell escape)",
"latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.run": "onFileChange",

The PYGMENTIZE environment variable is supposed to tell latexmk where to find the pygmentize executable, but latexmk can call pdflatex and it won't pass this environment variable with it. I'm not exactly sure what is the best way to address this.

The bottom line is latexmk and pdflatex need to be able to access the pygmentize executable located in venv/bin and select it over other versions of pygmentize that may be in your path variable. An easy, bad solution is to add .../venv/bin to your path.

Troubleshooting

Ensure that your custom pygmentize executable is selected by default. You can check with which pygmentize. Making your .../venv/bin appear earlier in your PATH is inadvisable as it would override your python executable as well. The quick and dirty fix is to keep this at the end of your path and to remove any pygmentize executables found in your path.

If pygmentize is configured correctly, you can create a test.msc file and fill it with some example script lines then run:

pygmentize -l msc2 -O full,style=msc_dark -o test.html test.msc

This should produce test.html which should be the colored script lines that you put in test.msc. If it can't find the lexer or the style, check that which pygmentize is in your venv and that you've installed the custom lexer and style with venv/bin/pip install ..

Contributing

If there are any sections you would like added, feel free to write them and write a PR. I may edit it to fit with the tone and style, but I will credit you. Feel free to hunt for errors or other things you think can be improved.