Re: {{ double braces }}

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> I have been looking at different ways to parse TeX syntax since I 
> occassionally do ConTeXt -> LaTeX conversion. Things like gema and regexs 
> are ok for small things: e.g., convert ConTeXt section commands to LaTeX 
> section commnads, convert figures, etc. Gema is better if you also want to 
> convert ConTeXt font commands to LaTeX; since it is easier to write nested 
> conversions. However, both fail miserably if you want to convert things 
> like ConTeXt multi-line math statements to LaTeX. For that a real parser 
> is needed. I have looked at Parsec (and Pandoc project) in Haskell, but 
> have not made too much progress there. Maybe lpeg is an easier to 
> understand parser. (But I sometimes get the feeling that the whole thing 
> will be easier in TeX, since TeX already parses itself :)

This is actualy pretty easy, I did that for a TeX->XML conversion once.
You have to redefine each and every command and make all special chars
like $ and _ \active, but it is in fact pretty easy and fairly reliable.

I would not do it like that again, these days I would use lpeg, but
it was not nearly as complicated to do it in tex macros as I had
anticipated.

Best wishes,
Taco

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