Thanks all - It seems there are many ways to do this, or perhaps just write the document in markdown and print it that way. I mean I guess I could always install and lear TeX (again) too.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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This sounds like the CSS @media print with extra steps
I used to write my papers in HTML and a custom print CSS file I made so it fits the school's formatting requirements. It worked surprisingly well. Just write HTML, and then just print it, as basic as it gets. That was easier than bending LaTeX to the school's template which was in MS Office format.
Always frustrates me how underutilized @media print is. Always liked crafting some good CSS for it on sites, especially ones that I worked on that were document heavy.
I write business letters in HTML. I have a custom letter.css and a base letter.html+.js that loads individual letters into a template. I have some custom tags for date, address and similar. The individual docs are super clean. I can export compiled html files with embedded css (no js needed) and images that render perfectly and are even smaller then the pdfs I export (print) and those are small too.
Two downsides. The biggest problem, I didn't find a way to do proper multi page docs. And especially Firefox has limited print css support.
Second: everything is crudely hacked together and in no way usable by others...
maybe chatgpt can rewrite the code better, so I can publish it?
There's a lot of libraries that convert html to markdown (and in the process get rid of all the javascript spyware).
The android app markdownr can do this on the fly, and I had an idea to create a markdown web browser using that as a base, but no time to work on it.
Yes this is a thing and it's been around for quite some time. If you're trying to approximate TeX, you may also be interested in MathML.
I need to go lay down; I'm having flashbacks to the good old days of "XML everywhere for everything all the time".
I mean you can do HTML -> TeX -> PDF with Pandoc, or to any other format pretty much. I would say writing markdown and passing it to TeX or directly to PDF is the most practical.
I use this one, and it's pretty nice: https://weasyprint.org/. They implement their own rendering engine so its support of new features and edge cases isn't the best, but every problem I've run into with it has been solvable with a little work. I really like it for laying out printed forms!