A basic template engine for LaTeX. Create dynamic documents by parsing JSON data and populating a custom template.
The script parses a template and fills it with data read from json files. Provide different json files to have multiple files with the same structure but varying content. Especially useful for translations.
Make sure you have the following programs installed on your system before moving forward.
- python
- LaTeX
Easily install TexRocket by using pip
pip install texrocket
At any time you can run the texrocket
script with the -h
or --help
flag to display usage information
usage: texrocket [-h] [-i INPUT_JSON] [-o OUTPUT_DIR] [-v] input_tex
Dynamic LaTeX generation from JSON, developed by Alberto Mosconi
positional arguments:
input_tex the LaTeX template file
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i INPUT_JSON, --input-json INPUT_JSON
the JSON file or directory of files
-o OUTPUT_DIR, --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
the directory for the output files
-v, --verbose print verbose output and save LaTeX logs
An example using all possible arguments is
texrocket TEMPLATE.tex -i input.json -o out/ -v
This will create an out/
folder, with the documents generated using the TEMPLATE.tex
template and the values inside input.json
out/
├── source/
│ └── TEMPLATE_input.tex
├── logs/
│ └── TEMPLATE_input.log
└── TEMPLATE_input.pdf
! All the JSON files MUST have the same structure, the engine will create multiple documents (one for each .json
file) starting from TEMPLATE.tex
.
The generated files have the following naming scheme
<TEMPLATE FILENAME>_<JSON FILENAME>.pdf
If the input JSON file is named main.json
then this will not show up
<TEMPLATE FILENAME>.pdf
To display a certain JSON value reference it with the following syntax
<section.title>
{
"section": {
"title": "The section title",
"text": "some text"
}
}
The example above will be rendered as "The section title"
.
You can avoid repetition of LaTeX code by using loops, which can be nested
\begin{itemize}
%startloop: first
\item <name>
\begin{itemize}
%startloop: second
\item <name>
%endloop
\end{itemize}
%endloop
\end{itemize}
{
"first": [
{
"name": "first main list item",
"second": [
{ "name": "secondary list item" }
]
},
{
"name": "second main list item",
"second": [
{ "name": "secondary list item" }
]
}
]
}