LaTeX? No: Glu. You can now write scientific papers in markdown using Glu.
See the how-to at https://boxesandglue.dev/glu/howto/scientific-paper/
Bonus: 100% tagged PDF so fully accessible!
#boxesandglue — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #boxesandglue, aggregated by home.social.
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The glu documentation has now a chapter on typography and special settings:
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PDF UA checker now checks for Math and displays the structure of the PDF file including formula. The PDF is created with boxes and glue.
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Again many updates from boxes and glue. glu is now at version 0.0.20 (I know that does't look good, but it has more features than other 2.x software) including
* Color and SVG fonts
* right to left and mixed typesetting
* PDF/UA-2 (tagged PDF 2.0)
* inline images (width depending on outer constraints)
* CMYK CSS support
* repeating table foot
* CSS attr() function
* and lots of bug fixes of courseEnhanced the examples at https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples
Homepage: https://boxesandglue.dev
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Busy (long) weekend: written a post on GitHub actions and glu: https://boxesandglue.dev/news/2026-05-glu-github-action/
Also updated glu to v0.0.19 and added some more examples at
https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu including some print CSS showcases.
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glu is getting mature. This is an example of a markdown file processed with glu (results in a PDF) and checked for accessibility by PAC. All green!
You get a perfectly tagged document from a markdown source with no additional work.
OpenSource, MIT license.
#accessibility #PDFUA #glu #boxesandglue #markdown -
Fixed two long standing bugs in the line breaking algorithm in boxes and glue. I had to re-read the Knuth paper about optimum fit line breaking... Both fixes are in v0.2.18
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There are some #xslfo examples in the glu examples section. This is mainly a proof of concept that you can implement your own typesetting system in glu (using Lua).
I am not sure if I create more examples, since XSLFO seems to be a somewhat dead technology. This was mainly done for demonstration purposes.
https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu/xslfo
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Another big step forward for boxes and glue / the Go API: bagme (boxes and glue made easy) is updated with new examples. The interface is so simple: just print some HTML code to the PDF, optionally styled with CSS. Thats it.
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Next big step for boxes and glue. There is a new example in https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/glu/markdown/slides for the command line interface which creates a fully accessible PDF from markdown source without any further settings!
Some specialities: Lua processing, CSS formatting, MetaPost decoration.
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This was an excellent week for boxes and glue.
* the textshape Text shaper is now usable and passes almost all harfbuzz tests (still working on the last ones)
* mpgo - a Go MetaPost code is now pretty much feature complete (an bug free, of course)
* hobby, a Lua frontend for mpgo works fine
* glu, a boxes and glue Lua frontend is getting more and more functionality
* boxes and glue can now render SVGs in PDF and is font aware. it uses the textshape engine to render fonts in SVG.
* Merged some pull requests for textshape and boxesandglue. -
A small follow-up from last post on high speed PDF generation with boxes and glue at
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Finally created a first real world example for the boxes and glue command line interface at https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/commandline/zugferdinvoice
Creating 1,000 EN 16931 compliant invoices in 14 seconds on an 2021 m1 MacBook Pro is not bad...
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Next attempt for a command line interface for #boxesandglue is now available at
https://github.com/boxesandglue/cli
There are binaries for Window, Linux and macOS and some sort of documentation at https://boxesandglue.dev/cli/. Very early stage, but it shows the direction. Great thank to the hackers at https://risor.io for the great language / Go bindings.
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So for Grazer Linuxtage (#glt25) I consider submitting a talk. I came up with two talk ideas so far. Which talk would you be interested in?
*Current state of digital typesetting*
a comparsion and explanation of typesetting engines like #TeX/#LuaLaTeX, #typst, #SILE, #boxesandglue, and frontends like #Quarto*New features in CSS3*
This talk assumes you are familiar with #CSS, but you need an update for the latest #CSS3 features with a focus on typography and line-based typesetting -
New blog post: creating PDF with JavaScript
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The boxes and glue repositories will move to their own GitHub organization. See https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue/discussions/8 #boxesandglue
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Linebreak tester updated at https://linebreak.boxesandglue.dev/ and https://github.com/speedata/linebreak-web to latest boxes and glue.
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This is pre alpha / experimental and just for me....
I'd like to have a visual test for the line breaking algorithm of boxes and glue, so I created a little HTML / canvas fronted with Go / Web Assembly (wasm)
https://linebreak.boxesandglue.dev
and
https://github.com/speedata/linebreak-web
More bells and whistles will follow.
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Still thinking about a pure Go graphics language for boxes and glue. One option would be porting #MetaPost to Go, but this is quite a bit of work. Any other possibilities / ideas?
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XTS Version 0.18 now released. With enhanced documentation at https://doc.speedata.de/xts/.
Slowly and quietly XTS is getting more and more mature, but there is still a long road ahead.
In comparison to the speedata Publisher, XTS has many more CSS capabilities, better XPath support and more consistent.
Download on the “Releases” page at https://github.com/speedata/xts
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The next releases of boxes and glue require go >= 1.21. After this, I try to be a bit more conservative and try to stay compatible to this version.
The reason is that boxes and glue requires the slog package, it is a structured logging package from the standard library. So even less external dependencies and more standardised behaviour.
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Only two more days until my talk “News from boxes and glue” at the TUG 2023 conference. This will be streamed on Youtube, so you can watch it online.
https://tug.org/tug2023/program.html (Friday, 12:15)
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Currently preparing my TUG 2023 presentation. Time for a recap.
This is the implementation status of boxes and glue in 2022 and 2023. There is progress. The backend is pretty much “complete”, the most work in the frontend has been in the HTML/CSS section.
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Friday is Infrastructure Friday.
So I have moved the boxes and glue website to a new CMS (Material for MkDocs - which is very awesome - @squidfunk) and I promise I will start / continue documenting boxes and glue as it gets more and more mature. Homepage is as before at https://boxesandglue.dev.
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XTS news: This has been a pretty busy week. Here are the news:
* XTS version 0.0.2 is released (https://github.com/speedata/xts/releases/tag/v0.0.2)
* There is the beginning of a manual at https://doc.speedata.de/xts/
* The example repo is at https://github.com/speedata/xts-examples
* XTS is now BSD licensed!What is #XTS? The XML typesetting system is a PDF database publishing software to create product catalogs and other high demand output. #speedata #boxesandglue
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Next version of boxes and glue will have have automatic font expansion setting to optimize the line breaking algorithm.
Don't overdue it. I think the second paragraph (with the second line squeezed by 1%) is okay, except for the different spacing in lines 1,2 and 3.
So there is still room for improvement, but nevertheless boxes and glue will be on par with TeX’s typographic capabilities.
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Thinking of joining the TUG 2023 meeting in Bonn this year. But approx. 1000 Euro just for attending a conference not far away seems to be a little high. And no, remote is not an option for me.
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Next version of boxes and glue has hanging punctuation. Now working on font expansion...
#boxesandglue #typography #css #pdf -
Working hard to get a first working version out for Christmas. Now bagme works with nested elements (such as div) adds border / background to elements.
Now it is so easy to get HTML into PDF from Go (https://github.com/speedata/bagme)
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Some new experiments with boxes and glue: I have created a new Go library called “bagme” (boxes and glue made easy) for PDF rendering HTML fragments styled with CSS. No big setup necessary.
https://github.com/speedata/bagme
(just a proof of concept at the moment)