PreTeXt-CLI-generated websites

[StevenClontz]

A thread to discuss an experimental feature of PreTeXt-CLi to generate a website for a book.

[rhinopotamus]

Some examples of working sites:

• TBIL.org
• pretext website

Ok, so probably the easiest way to get started fiddling with this experimental feature:

• in your project root directory, create a folder called /site
• within that folder, create site.ptx
• then make a subfolder called /pages
• and then start putting various .md files in there for Pelican to eat.

pretext-cli parses any xml in site.ptx into Pelican settings, so that is probably the list of reasonable elements. Apparently you can also specify this kind of thing in json.

The code that does this starts hereish.

[rhinopotamus]

It would be cool if you could generate index.html from markdown.

The pretext theme dumps PTX_SITE_DESCRIPTION in as raw html. I wonder if there is a way to generate html from markdown before it is dumped in here, maybe through a jinja filter.

I thought about this for a while but didn't see any reasonable way to do it. I'm going to fall back to making a markdown post, having pelican generate it, copy-pasting the html, and then setting the post to hidden.

[oscarlevin]

I understand how pelican works better now so I think there are some neat things I could try to get working. What about a cli function that generated some template files in /site? So if you wanted to get something more complex than the basic theme we generate automatically, you run pretext init site or similar. We could even have pretext init site --style course|book|personal that gives you different looks (personal might include a blog, for example).