Semantic TeX

[Deyan Ginev]

Hi Aaron, all,

Silently lurking LaTeXML developer here. (with additional affiliation
to the mostly stagnant sTeX project that was mentioned by Yuri).

With a medium amount of work (maybe in the 1 week to 1 month range)
you could create a new binding in LaTeXML that maps a personal macro
dialect (e.g. living in a custom .sty file of choice) to a custom XML
schema of choice. LaTeXML has a mechanism that allows for extensions
to its main XML schema, as long as the extension lives in its own
dedicated XML namespace. sTeX did that with the "omdoc:" namespace and
the OMDoc schema for example. At the moment the main schema support is
via RelaxNG however, there is no support for XSD.

With that said, I always encourage such projects to think about living
in the web-first paradigm from the onset. Namely, to consider if they
can achieve most of what they seek in the HTML5+RDFa paradigm, which
allows for a Semantic Web approach to combining
presentation+semantics. We also have some latexml tooling to support
that direction of work. Casting one's work in that light often makes
it easier to also arrive at an ePub target (which latexml has native
support for), and generally makes the representation target a little
more future-proof.

Mandatory disclaimer: there are a number of reasonable converters out
there to choose from, notably tex4ht, I'm just discussing one that I
am personally involved with. Writing your own LaTeX parser is
generally a bad idea, unless you're solving some simple one-time need
or working with a minimal LaTeX subset.

Greetings,
Deyan

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 7:49 AM Aaron Gray <aaronngray.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone know of or interested in specifying a semantic version of TeX
> that can be represented in XSD XML Schema format and then converted
> into near isomorphic C++/C#/Java/TypeScript classes (and enums).
>
> I know there are issues with TeX using lexical definitions that break
> the syntactic and maybe semantic models, so converting from TeX to the
> sematic data format and XML and back might need some special attention
> in order to provide conformance.
>
> If anyone is interested we can have a group conversation or you can
> contact me directly if you wish.
>
> I was looking for a flex/bison TeX parsing solution that dealt with
> lexical based defintions but I cannot seem to find it anymore either
> in my bookmarks or in my backups.
>
> Regards,
>
> Aaron
> --
> Aaron Gray
>
> Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language
> Researcher, Information Theorist, and amateur computer scientist.