#4 More flexibility in LaTeX generation

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

I would like to use epydoc for generating PDF documents,
and
have the following wishes for this:

1. More flexibility in use of
LaTeX style Instead of hard-coding this, it could be a default which
could be substituted with a command-line argument (so I could
write my own sty-file).

2. Related to 1. -- avoid specific driver
dependence, such as the use of the dvips option. I would like to use
pdflatex, which usually produces much better pdf output than
dvips->ps2pdf. If this were part of the style-file, it would be covered by
1.

3. The ability to output various types of tex-files; not just full
documents, but, for example, files without
\begin{document}/\end{document} etc., with \section as the
toplevel headings. These could be included in chapters of longer
LaTeX documents. This would be useful when putting the API
documentation as one chapter in a full manual of some sort. Again,
this could probably be done with some simple
configurability/switches, related to 1., above.

In sum: It
would be great if the LaTeX output could be configured to a greater
extent. (I have no similar requests for the HTML output, as I think
that's great the way it is ;)

[Edward Loper]

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Unfortunately, I don't really have enough LaTeX expertise
to know how to do this myself. But if you'd be willing to
either:

1. show me what the output should look like, with
different options.

or, even better: :)

2. give me a patch that does the right thing.

Then maybe I can add this kind of flexibility.

[Edward Loper]

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Thanks to patches from Jonathan Guyer, epydoc now uses style files (.sty) to separate semantics from formatting decisions. you can use the "--sty" option to select among a few builtin style files (boxes, shaded, base), or to specify your own style file. See "TEMPLATE" in epydoc/docwriter/latex_sty.py for a template to start writing your style file from.

Epydoc also now uses pdflatex by default, and latex if pdflatex is not available. If you want to force the use of one or the other, use "--pdfdriver=latex" or "--pdfdriver=pdflatex".

If you do write your own style file, you are encouraged to email it to me, so I can include it in future epydoc versions!