Note

This README, while providing a basic introduction, is probably outdated in many important ways in the context of this fork.

Installation of this package is done just like any other modern Python package. See the INSTALL file for details.

Once you have plasTeX installed, you can use the command-line utility, called "plastex" just like latex or pdflatex. For example, if you have a LaTeX file called mybook.tex, simply run:

plastex mybook.tex

This will convert mybook.tex into XHTML (the default renderer). Of course, there are many options to control the execution of plastex. Simply type "plastex" on the command line without options or arguments to see the full list of command-line options.

It is also possible to write your own command-line utilities that leverage the power of the plasTeX framework. In fact, the essence of the "plastex" command can be written in just one line of code (not including the Python import commands):

import sys
from plasTeX.TeX import TeX
from plasTeX.Renderers.XHTML import Renderer
Renderer().render(TeX(file=sys.argv[1]).parse())

plasTeX is really much more than just a LaTeX-to-other-format converter though. See the documentation at http://plastex.sf.net/ for a complete view of what it is capable of.