Introduction to RapidTeX
RapidTeX is a document markup language for creating well-structured documents.
It is also the name of the software used to convert RapidTeX documents to LaTeX and HTML.
RapidTeX is an easy markup-language compared to HTML and LaTeX. However it still retains powerful markup functionality for tables, etc...
The RapidTeX software can convert RapidTeX document to HTML format for use on the web, or to LaTeX format for further processing to for example PostScript or Portable Document Format (PDF).
The power of RapidTeX is its straightforward notation, especially when it comes to basic text, the following example will illustrate a simple piece of a RapidTeX document:
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Simple demonstration
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This is a _simple_ demonstration of RapidTeX code:
-- RapidTeX is called "rapid" because of it's faster notation compared to LaTeX and ^HTML^
-- RapidTeX is called "TeX" because its main export goes to LaTeX format
-- However, RapidTeX can export to HTML just as well!
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There is however a powerful RapidTeX editor (RapidTeXEdit) available to easily create RapidTeX documents with, its usage is recommend! You can find this software here.
Features of the RapidTeX Markup Language
Do note that RapidTeX's current version is 0.3 and is still in beta-stage:
- Easy, fast and straightforward markup language
- Good sectioning support (chapters, sections, subsections)
- Exportable to professional PS/PDF files, and professional HTML pages.
- Supports bulleted and enumerated lists
- Supports complicated and higly configurable tables
- Extensive color support, also in tables
- Strong support for including graphics
- Supports text wrapped along graphics
- Support for hyperlinks
- Support for highlighting
- Support for (colored or plain) boxes
- Strong unicode (utf-8) support (through the LaTeX packages cjk-latex and unicodefonts)
- Language is highly expandable and modularized, which provides strong support for templates
- Supports rendering LaTeX code to images to be included in HTML (ideal for math environment)
- Supports LaTeX-only and HTML-only code blocks in document
- Support for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) when outputting to HTML
Planned features for the future
- support more levels in lists
- make lists more configurable
- table of contents, index and bibliography support for HTML output
- good support for IndicTeX and ArabTeX
Requirements
To write RapidTeX source, you really only need a unicode text editor, and with the RapidTeX software you can export your source to an HTML file. But to output to PDF/PS, there are some requirements:
- a LaTeX2e-compliant TeX distribution. We recommend MikTeX for Windows users.
- the default LaTeX packages that come with nearly every distro (graphicx, hyperref, color, minipage, etc)
- the packages cjk-latex and unicodefonts are required for correct handling of unicode. The latter is not probably not available on your system yet.
- pdfLaTeX is recommended to export to PDF, but not required
Download
- Download RapidTeX 0.3 (this software is in beta stage and currently only runs on systems based on UNIX)
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Download RapidTeX 0.2 (this software is now obsolete and incompatible with RapidTeX 0.3)
Installation
Follow the instructions in the file rapidtex.pdf.
Documentation
The documentation can be found in rapidtex.pdf, an online version can be found here
RapidTeXEdit
There is a GUI editor available for RapidTeX, it is called RapidTeXEdit and is written in Python/Tk, it can be found here. This software makes writing RapidTeX documents even easier!