The PreTeXt Guide

This section is intended for users who have read Chapter 1 and are already experienced with other open-source software projects or command-line tools. If you’re more interested in a browser-based workflow to getting started with PreTeXt, check out Section 2.1.

PreTeXt is an open-source XML¹⁰ language primarily powered by XSLT¹¹ and Python¹² tools.

For new authors comfortable working on the command line who want to use their favorite text editor or IDE, we recommend pip installing the PreTeXt-CLI from the Python Package Index. Section 5.2 has these details, and pretext -h and pretext CMD -h are at your disposal as well after installation.

Some context for experienced Python developers: PreTeXt development is primarily split over two GitHub repositories: PreTeXtBook/pretext¹³ for the “core” functionality of PreTeXt, and the more recent PreTeXtBook/pretext-cli¹⁴ that packages up these resources into a Python package with several UX enhancements such as a simplified command line interface and project management that does not require the use of custom makefiles.

If you’re interested in potentially contributing back to PreTeXt someday, please feel free to request to join our developer Google Group¹⁵ and say hello!