TempLatex

A jinja2 dialect for latex templating in python.

Why not the default jinja2?

jinja2's default escape works great for HTML but is not user-friendly for latex because latex heavily uses curly brackets {} .

For example, if you want to produce the following latex code:

x = \frac{b}{c}

Where b and c will be replaced by an actual number, for example: {"b": 42, "c": 3}.

The jinja2 version will be:

from jinja2 import Template

template = """
x = \\frac{{{ b }}}{{"{"}}{{ c }}{{"}"}}
"""
# {{"}"}} will render to }

data = {
    'a': 13,
    'b': 42,
    'c': 3
}

j2_template = Template(template)
print(j2_template.render(data))

You will notice that because both latex and jinja2 heavily rely on {}, the template string will be populated with {}, make it hard to read and modify.

In templatex, we can write the following code:

from templatex import Template

template = """
x = \\frac{@= b =@}{@= c =@}
"""

data = {
    'a': 13,
    'b': 42,
    'c': 3
}

j2_template = Template(template)
print(j2_template.render(data))

What this package changes

Changed Default Jinja2 configuration.

Template changes jinja2's default configuration to the following:

Enviroment(
    loader,
    trim_blocks=True,
    block_start_string='@@',
    block_end_string='@@',
    variable_start_string='@=',
    variable_end_string='=@',
    autoescape=False,
    comment_start_string='\#{',
    comment_end_string='}',
    line_statement_prefix='%%',
    line_comment_prefix='%#',
)

As a result, you only need to adopt the following syntax:

• variable render: @= var_name =@
• block logic: @@ for my_item in my_collection @@
• comment: \#{ your comment }

Add a latex escape filter

Jinja2, by default, will perform auto HTML escaping on rendered variables, but I couldn't figure out how to change its default escape filter implementation. As a result, we disabled this feature and provided a latex escape filter so template authors can manually escape string variables as needed.

For example:

When rendering @= my_var =@, and if my_var="$5.0", the resulting latex code cannot be compiled due to the unescaped $ character. You can use @= my_var | escape_latex =@, where the escape_latex filter will escape $ character to valid latex: \$.

Other features

Since this is still the same jinja2 engine at its core, users should refer to the jinja2 site for documentation on other features.

Inspiration

I adopted the solution from this answer on stackoverflow, and added some modifications.