Fex: A Forth to LaTeX converter.

A simple Forth sublanguage to write LaTeX.

Introduction

Fex is a simple language based on Forth and with a syntax near txt2tags to generate LaTeX file and produce the associated ps or pdf files. Fex is a gforth script. It comes with an emacs mode.

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A simple example

Here is a simple document example (colored version): 

document(  title: This is the document title.

section: A first section

  The text is here. This one is *( in bold face )* and
  this one is _( underlined. )_

section: A second section

  /( This is the text in the second section. It is in italic. )/

)document

Important note: Fex is a Forth sublanguage. So each commands like title:, *(, )/ ... are Forth words.
They need to be separated by spaces.

Save this document as simple.fex. Build the document with a command like this one: 
$ fex simple.fex

And the result looks like this:

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Other examples

A full example can be found in English here or in French here.

Fex can be interactive (like Forth). Here are the available commands from the prompt line:

bye, make-dvi, make-ps, view-ps, make-pdf, view-pdf,
save-ps, save-pdf, clean, clean-all, print

You can type 'help' or 'usage' at prompt time to have more actions details.

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Downloads

Sources: fex-1.tar.gz

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Installation

Extract the tar.gz archive somewhere:

$ tar xzvf fex-N.tar.gz

And copy the fex file somewhere in your $PATH. For example, as root:

cp fex /usr/local/bin

Or if you want an English version:

cp fex-en /usr/local/bin/fex

To build a document you'll need to have gforth, latex, dvips, gv, xpdf and lpr installed on your system.

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Customisation

Fex is simple to extend. For example, you can change the pdf viewer with a change in the 'pdf' word (one line).

You can also add your own commands to fex. See the section near the end of the file where commands words are defined. A new command is auto documented directly in the word command.

Indeed a new command can be added at the begining of the document file.

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Contact

You can reach me by mail at hocwp@free.fr.

Have fun!

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