LaTeX limitations in Gramps

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1

The Note markup and preformat in reports section in the wiki is somewhat negative about LaTeX. and may even have some misinformation.

LaTeX output interprets the markup to its best of possibilities. LaTeX is not well suited as a typesetting language to add custom style. That would break the benefits LaTex offers. Hence, the following is done:
  bold, underline and italic is supported
  fontsize is mapped to the size indicators of LaTeX in a fuzzy manner
  mono fonts are shown as a mono spaced font
  color and font is not supported
  preformatted is handled correctly

I have not used LaTeX enough to re-write this to be correct & separate opinion from fact.

It seemed that the contributors to this conversation have the knowledge to help.

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While the tone is perhaps a bit more negative than necessary, the sentiment is actually correct. While LaTeX can be made to look like anything (and in 30+ years using it, I’ve probably done it), it is not necessarily easy, and definitely not from a third-party, mostly GUI tool. LyX is a good example of what can be done as a GUI front end document editor, but that is a whole project in and of itself that I would prefer the Gramps developers not try to replicate.

So maybe something like this:

  • Latex format translates the note markup into simple LaTeX commands. It is not possible to take advantage of the full power of LaTeX from within Gramps, but the LaTeX file can be edited after output to improve the format to taste. The following markup is recognized:

    • bold, underline, and italics work as expected
    • “preformatted” is handled correctly
    • the numerical fontsize is mapped to the size indicators of LaTeX (\small, \normalsize,\large, etc.) in a fuzzy manner
    • mono fonts are shown as a mono spaced font
    • color and font families are not supported
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Thanks! That reads well and has more actionable information.

Being accurate about shortcomings, bugs and such is reasonable. That helps people use tools appropriately. But I’m glad to eliminate any unsupported condemnation of a format.

BTW, I left in the line about ‘preformatted being handled’.

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Actually, if you wanted to be short and sweet and similar to the other formats, you could just say:

  • LaTeX supports the preformatted setting and partially supports markup; font family and colors are currently not supported.
    • Editing the exported LaTeX file is expected if fine tuning is desired.

and be done with it. (Note that with some modest effort, both could be supported with the proper LaTeX prerequisites.)

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I just saw your update. I did tweak the subbullets in my original response to fix up some grammar and put them in (what I think) is a slightly more logical order. If you don’t want to use the short version, you might have a second look at them. Either way, thanks for asking for input.

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Howz:

LaTeX supports the preformatted setting and partially supports font emphasis stylings and size markup;
output does not support font family or colors markup at the moment.

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