[texhax] LaTeX Parser

[William Adams]

On Aug 18, 2011, at 5:26 PM, sgutierr at caltech.edu wrote:

> Hi. I'm working on some software which requires a LaTeX parser. I was
> wondering if I can get the source to the parser used by the LaTeX
> software. If so, where might I download that? Thanks in advance.

There are two different things at work here:

 - the LaTeX macro code

http://mirror.ctan.org/info/latex2e-help-texinfo/latex2e.pdf

There should be a nice hyperlinked .pdf in here:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/latex-tds

(or make your own by processing the LaTeX source)

 - The best reference is _The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Ed._

http://www.latex-project.org/guides/books.html

(purchase it from here though http://www.tug.org/books/ )

 - TeX itself --- you'll want _The TeXbook and _TeX: The Program_

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/abcde.html

In addition you may find the following works helpful to understand TeX:

 - _TeX for the Impatient_ http://mirror.ctan.org/info/impatient/book.pdf

 - _TeX by Topic_ http://eijkhout.net/texbytopic

I'd still like to see a bibliography / reference of what one needs to read / understand before being able to grok the LaTeX source (I always get lost digging in it --- eventually I find what I need, but it's always a struggle).

You'll probably find the source code of latex2html and tth and hevea of interest --- another interesting possibility would by the source for LyX, which is able to parse LaTeX to convert it to LyX's internal format.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.