help.txt

Latex2gmd by Calvin Liu

1. What is the overall goal of the project (i.e. what does it do, or what problem is it solving)?
The goal of the project is to render Latex (.tex files) into Github Flavored Markdown. It allows for
quickly importing a Latex file with mathematical symbols and formulas as a README.md file for Github
repositories.

2. Which languages did you use, and what parts of the system are implemented in each?
I used Python to implement the "server" also acting as the main component of the system; Go was used
for the "client" which would parse the Latex files into tokens to be processed as output; C++ was used
to process the tokens into an output form that would be recognized as Github Flavored Markdown.

3. What methods did you use to communicate between languages?
I used RabbitMQ (message queue) to communicate between client (written in Go) and server (written in
Python), and used SWIG to call C++ functions from Python to output a proper .md file.

4. Exactly what steps should be taken to get the project working, after getting your code? [This should
start with vagrant up and can include one or two commands to start components after that.]
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd <into_the_project_directory>
./compileswig.sh
./latex2gmd.sh <filename>.tex <filename>.md
(optional command: ./cleanup.sh will remove all the compiled swig files)

Important Note: When committing to the gitlab environment, the Unix-like systems LF was converted to
DOS/Windows style line endings (CR LF) and that causes problems when trying to run the bash scripts.
When running the script, you might run into an error with the following message:

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

to resolve this, you can do the following to each of the script files and revert the line ending back
to Unix-like systems LF by doing the following commands (hit enter after each command):

vim cleanup.sh
:set ff=unix
:wq

do the same for compileswig.sh and latex2gmd.sh; unfortunately I do not know how to fix this on the
gitlab repository, but this should revert the line endings and allow the scripts to run properly.

Note: sample.tex is a good example of what the project can do, where I test common Latex math functions.

5. What features should we be looking for when marking your project?
- Parts of the source code has cool implementations such as lines 300-302 in client.go which uses sorting
  of a slice of structs by a field in the structs
- To see the output.md file, it is best to create an empty repository and copy paste the contents into
  a README.md to see how it is rendered into Github repositories
- SWIG interface allows certain types such as vectors to be imported directly into Python with all the
  functions related to that library and can be seen in output.i file