∑ LaTeX packages

Preview support for what the common LaTeX packages add: glossaries, biblatex, csquotes, amsmath, hyperref and the rest.

Identifier	com.yaz.latex-packages
Version	0.1.0
Needs yaz	0.3.0 or newer
Asks for	nothing
Source	texyaz/yaz-latex-packages

Preview support for what the common LaTeX packages add: glossaries, biblatex, csquotes, amsmath, hyperref, cleveref, microtype, booktabs, longtable, pdflscape and the rest.

A plugin for yaz.

The line this is on the far side of

yaz knows LaTeX itself — the kernel and the standard classes — and nothing else. \section, itemize, $x^2$, \textbf, figure: those are what a .tex file is, and an editor for LaTeX that needed a plugin to show a heading would not be doing its job.

Everything a package adds is here. \gls is glossaries. \parencite is biblatex. \enquote is csquotes. Each is somebody's package, each could be replaced by a different package doing the same job, and there is no end to the list — which is exactly the shape of thing that should live outside the application rather than accumulate inside it.

The test is not "does a real thesis use it". A real thesis uses \gls 561 times. The test is: does \documentclass{article} alone define it?

What is in here

Package	What yaz learns
glossaries	\gls and its seven relatives, \printglossaries, \makeglossaries
biblatex	\parencite, \textcite, \footcite, \autocite, \printbibliography
natbib	\citep, \citet
csquotes	\enquote and \textquote, drawn with the marks the document's language uses — and \textquote's optional argument kept as the citation it attributes the passage to
amsmath	align, gather, multline, flalign, alignat, \eqref
hyperref	\autoref, \nameref
cleveref	\cref, \Cref
microtype	\textls
booktabs	\toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule
longtable, tabularx	the tables, and their run-on rules
pdflscape, rotating	landscape, sidewaystable — which turn the page
placeins, ragged2e, makeidx, graphicx	the smaller ones

\usepackage is not consulted. A document that uses \gls gets it drawn whether or not it loaded glossaries — because a document using \gls without loading it is a document that does not compile, and reporting that is the compiler's job rather than the preview's.

The Glossary tab

\printglossaries does not produce pages in the preview. It produces a card where it stands and a tab beside the document, which this plugin registers through the public workspace.registerView (ADR-0025).

The reason is that nothing in the buffer knows how long a glossary is going to be. Drawing one across pages meant guessing, and the guess was confidently wrong — entries split mid-definition, the page count off by three. A tab makes no claim about pagination and shows every entry, which is what somebody opening a glossary wanted in the first place.

Clicking an entry describes it in the Details tab: its short form, its long form, and where it is defined.

It declares; it does not scan

This plugin never walks a document, and the API does not let it.

yaz walks the document once per keystroke, and that constraint is load-bearing: measured against a joined 175 KB thesis, a second walk costs more than everything else in the decoration pass put together. A dozen plugins each walking it would be a dozen times that.

So a contribution is a declaration — this name, drawn this way — and yaz does the finding. A plugin never sees an offset:

this.registerLatexVocabulary({
  commands: {
    gls: { kind: "glossary" },
    parencite: { kind: "citation" },
    enquote: { kind: "quotation" },
  },
  environments: {
    landscape: { kind: "turned" },
    align: { kind: "math" },
  },
});

A contribution may not claim a name LaTeX itself defines. \section means what LaTeX says it means, and a preview that depended on which plugins happened to be installed would be a preview of something other than the document.

Adding a package

src/vocabulary.ts is grouped by package, one const per \usepackage, because the question anyone will have is why does yaz know this command — and the answer should be readable in one place. Add a group, add it to the exported object, done.

Capabilities

None. This plugin reads nothing, writes nothing and reaches no network; it hands yaz a table of names and a tab, and stops.

Development

git clone https://github.com/texyaz/yaz-latex-packages
cd yaz-latex-packages
pnpm install
pnpm check

Point yaz at this directory in Settings → Plugins → Development plugin and use Reload plugins. See writing a plugin.

Licence

MIT. The application is AGPL-3.0, but its plugin API is MIT and so is this, so that anyone can copy it as a starting point without inheriting a licence they did not choose.