[Edu-sig] Writing books/manuals containing code

[Alexander Schliep]

Hi everyone,

LaTeX is (rightfully so, IMHO) the standard for scientific publishing, in 
particular for books if there is any math context. To automate the 
production of PDFs with up-to-date code examples, sample outputs and 
figures (that is sometimes more difficult) you can use make. Appropriate 
rules create output such that myscript.py produces myscript.out whenever 
myscript.py is changed.

Both code and output can be incorporated and pretty-printed using the 
listings package; the only bummer is that you have to reference line 
numbers. It would be nice if you could reference particular pieces more 
easily; Knuth's original programming tools seemed not that much more 
helpful for the lots of theory and small sample programs and their output 
type publications.

I use pyexpect to capture the output of an interactive session given
some commands a user would type in a file. I just stumbled over 
http://starship.python.net/crew/bhoel/PyLaTeX-0.2/README.html
which is another way to have Python code in LaTeX.

Best,
Alexander



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Alexander Schliep                                    schliep at molgen.mpg.de