This manual gives a short overview of how to use RapidTeX. RapidTeX is a document markup language, as well as a converter to HTML and a preprocessor for LaTeX.
The installation script install.sh will take care of installing RapidTeX in /usr/local/bin. userinstall.sh should be executed by every user that wants to use rapidtex so that the necessary files are copied to the directory .rapidtex in his home directory.
For those not wanting to use the install scripts, this is the manual procedure:
There are scripts who will take care of the build process for you, those scripts are called rptex2pdf, rptex2ps and rptex2html. All make use of a temporary directory /tmp/rapidtex/ which will be automatically created.
We will discuss the usage of each script:
The command rptex2pdf document reads document.rptex (note that the extension is not specified on the commandline!) and produces document.pdf. This script requires pdflatex and will automatically display the resulting file in gv
The command rptex2ps document reads document.rptex (note that the extension is not specified on the commandline!) and produces document.ps. This script requires latex and will automatically display the resulting file in gv
The command rptex2html document reads document.rptex (note that the extension is not specified on the commandline!) and produces document.html. The script will automatically display the resulting file in mozilla.
Of course, you can also decide not to use these easy build scripts and go through it all manually.
If you issue the command rapidtex yourdocument.rptex you will get your file converted to LaTeX formatting, output will be directed to stdout by default. You can of course direct output to a TeX file and run it through LaTeX with a command like the following:
rapidtex yourdocument.rptex > yourdocument.tex; latex yourdocument.tex; xdvi yourdocument.dvi
If you want to output to HTML, then you can use a command similar to the following:
rapidtex yourdocument.rptex html > yourdocument.html
The RapidTeX (pre)processor can be enabled and disabled for certain parts of the source file, write on a single line to disable the preprocessor, and write to enable it again. By default, it is enabled immediately.
RapidTeX syntax consists out of so-called commands, symbols, markers and variables. There is also a special category of commands which are called hard-commands, those are encoded in the program itself. The commands, symbols and markers are defined in the RapidTeX files commands.rptex, symbols.rptex and markers.rptex. RapidTeX automatically includes all of these for every file it reads.
Commands, unlike symbols, can take parameters and are usually more complex. There are commands and symbols which come in sets, denoting a begin and an end, And there are those who do not. Both have a seperate syntax:
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An example of a command which comes in a set, with parameters:
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Note that it is good practise to enclose each parameter in curled braces, as shown above, this ensures the parameter is read as an entity from begin to end, the argument can then contain spaces and other characters which would normally seperate it from the next argument.
Below you will see an example of a symbol which does not come in a set:
a -> b |
This symbol will be converted to a nice arrow (→) in the output.
Next, a command which does not come in a set, along with a parameter:
\image {picture.jpg}
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Note that in this case the curled braces are necessary in this case, because the period would otherwise split the parameter, that's why we stated earlier that it's always good practise to enclose all parameters in curled braces.
RapidTeX supports two types of comments:
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The first comment is a comment that will also be included (as comment) in the HTML,LaTeX output. The second comment will not show in any output. Note that both comments must appear on a single line.
Markers are also essential in RapidTeX, and they are extremely easy to understand. A marker marks a word or a range of words and applies an action to them. The following example will illustrate the most common markers in RapidTeX:
The word *blah* will be bold, The word _blah_ will be slanted, The word __blah__ will be underlined The word ^blah^ will be written in a typewriter font |
Last, but not least we will discuss variables, variables are always preceded by a dollar-sign and are assigned as the following example illustrates:
$blah={This is a variable}
$blah
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In this example, the output will print "This is a variable", the first line produces no output at all and just assigns a value to the variable blah (note that there are no spaces allowed between the variabele name, the assignment operator, and the value. The value must always be enclosed within curled braces.
We suggest you to check out the file example.rptex which will show most, if not all, of the functionality of RapidTeX.
Although it is possible to just start typing away immediately, you will usually want a header (corresponding to the LaTeX preamble and HTML head) to your document.
The following example will show a typical header:
$title={This is the title}
$author={Me, myself and I}
\report
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The command initialize will produce the actual header for LaTeX or HTML. There are a number of variables you can set before initializing the document, such as title and author.
Another important command issued before initiazing is the command that defines the style of the document (this reflects in LaTeX output only). In this case we choose report, other possible styles are book, article, and letter. Note that articles and letters don't support chapters.
After initializing the document, you might want to add the command multilingual to enable support for writing in multiple languages using unicode.
Then the command document, which comes in a set, defines the begin and the end of the document.
Below you will find an extensive table of the symbols used for mathematical purpouses:
1: --> 2: <-- 3: ==> 4: <== 5: -> 6: <- 7: >= 8: <= 9: << 10: >> 11: == 12: <> 13: != |
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When it comes to making tables, the following example will illustrate a basic table:
--- 1 | 2 | 3 4 | 5 | 6 7 | 8 | 9 --- |
The pipe character is the column seperator, the three hyphens (no more! no less!) indicate a horizontal line. Each row of the table has to appear on one single line. Note that there are also a lot of variables which influence the appearance of a table, check example.rptex to see examples of that.
Important Note: To end a table, you should leave two white lines at the end of the table RapidTeX needs them to detect that the table has really ended! Another option is to use the force close command which consists of a slash between less-than and greater-than signs.
Making bulleted or enumareted lists is also a piece of cake, take a look at the following example:
Below you will find a list of the numbers 1 to 9: -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7 -- 8 -- 9 |
Important Note: To end a list, you should leave two white lines at the end of the table RapidTeX needs them to detect that the list has really ended! Another option is to use the force close command which consists of a slash between less-than and greater-than signs.
An enumerated list is very similar, the numbers will be calculated automatically:
Below you will find a list of the numbers 1 to 9: +- 1 +- 2 +- 3 +- 4 +- 5 +- 6 +- 7 +- 8 +- 9 |
The following table shows symbols related to fontsize, you can use these at any point to set a specific fontsize. The greater-than signs denote bigger fontsizes, the less-than signs denote smaller fontsize, the one in the center is the "normal" fontsize.
\<<<< \<<< \<< \< \= \> \>> \>>> \>>>> |
The following table shows symbols related to text alignment, those symbols come in pairs:
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RapidTeX, like LaTeX and HTML, does not care much about the use of carriage returns in the input. Carriage returns in the input file will not always result in vertical spacing in the output file. A carriage return between paragraphs will have result, but whether you put 1 or 10, the effect remains the same. If you need to create a gap of vertical spacing, then the following symbols are available:
\+ \++ \+++ |
The more plusses, the bigger the gap, though three the limit, but nothing prevents you from using that same symbol twice in a row.
At times, you might need to force a carriage return, the symbol you can use for this consists of two backslashes (equivalent to LaTeX). The only situation in which you might need this is before a table, picture, image, or box.
We already discussed the markers before, but we will once again list the most important ones:
The following code:
The word *blah* will be bold, The word _blah_ will be slanted, The word __blah__ will be underlined The word ^blah^ will be written in a fixed-width font |
will result in:
| The word blah will be bold, The word blah will be slanted, The word blah will be underlined The word blah will be written in a fixed-width font |
Sectioning is achieved as illustrated by the following example, you should always use these and never manually increase the font size to create a section title:
============ Chapter 1 ============ ------------ Introduction ------------ Blah blah... |
Note that those horizontal lines may be of any size, as long as they are longer than six characters. Moreover, note that chapter can only be used in report and book style documents, and not in article or letter style documents.
Sections are numbered by default, if you do not want that then prefix the lines with an asterisk as the following the example illustrates:
*============ Chapter 1 *============ *------------ Introduction *------------ Blah blah... |
RapidTeX supports images and pictures, the difference between the two is that an image has no caption while a picture does have one. When you want to export to HTML and PDF, you should make sure all pictures are in Jpeg format, also make sure the images are in the same directory as the document itself.
Image and picture command have three variants, these determine the alignment of the picture (minus aligns it left, equal aligns it in the center, plus aligns it right)
\image- {blah.jpg}
\image= {blah.jpg}
\image+ {blah.jpg}
\picture- {blah.jpg} {This is a picture!}
\picture= {blah.jpg} {This is a picture!}
\picture+ {blah.jpg} {This is a picture!}
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You can also give text a particular color. For the three main colors you can use:
The word |
For more color you can use:
The word |
The names of the color are compatible with HTML and the X11 color-naming scheme.
If you want to specify an EXACT color by value, then you can use:
For more color you can use:
The word |
Note that the command rgb takes two arguments, the first color is the color for LaTeX output, while the second colour is the color for HTML output. The first has the format r,g,b, where all three have a value between 0 and 1. In the second, all are hexadecimal values with a value between 00 and ff.
In this document we only discussed the basic things, for more information, we suggest you to inspect example.rptex and its output. You can also check out rapidtex.rptex, which is the source of this manual.