rinohtype is a batch-mode document processor. It renders structured documents to PDF based on a document template and a style sheet. An important design goal of rinohtype is make document layout and style customization user-friendly. See the documentation to learn how to customize the style of your document.
Since rinohtype is a fairly sizable project and currently being maintained by a single person, your contribution can make a big difference. Specifically, the following things can help move rinohtype forward:
- development of professional-looking stylesheets and document templates
- volunteering to be a maintainer: fix issues that pop up when new versions of dependencies are released (Python, Sphinx, ...)
- help with maintaining and improving the documentation
- development of new features, e.g. widow/orphan handling, Knuth-Plass line breaking, mathematics typesetting, performance improvements, ...
- companies might be interested in funding the development of particular features that would benefit them
So if you are interested in helping with any of these items, please don't hesitate to get in touch via [email protected], GitHub issues or Gitter!
rinohtype is still in beta, so you might run into some issues when using it. I'd highly appreciate it if you could create a ticket for any bugs you may encounter. That said, rinohtype is already quite capable. For example, it should be able to replace Sphinx's LaTeX builder in most cases. Here is an overview of the main features:
- a powerful page layout system supporting columns, running headers/footers, floatable elements and footnotes
- support for figures and (large) tables
- automatic generation of table of contents and index
- automatic numbering and cross-referencing of section headings, figures and tables
- configure one of the included document templates or create your own
- an intuitive style sheet system inspired by CSS
- modular design allowing for multiple frontends (such as reStructuredText, Markdown, DocBook, ...)
- handles OpenType, TrueType and Type1 fonts with support for advanced typographic features such as kerning, ligatures, small capitals and old style figures
- embeds PDF, PNG and JPEG images, preserving transparency and color profiles
- easy to install and deploy; pure-Python with few dependencies
- built on Unicode; ready for non-latin languages
rinohtype's primary input format is reStructuredText. The rinoh command
line tool renders reStructuredText documents and the included Sphinx builder
makes it possible to output large documents with your own style applied. Have
a look at the rinohtype documentation for an example of the output.
rinohtype supports Python 3.5 and up. For parsing reStructuredText and CommonMark documents, rinohtype depends on docutils and recommonmark respectively. pip takes care of these requirements when you install rinohtype.
Syntax highlighting of code blocks is eneabled if Pygments is installed, which will be installed automatically with Sphinx. If you want to include images other than PDF, PNG or JPEG, you also need to install Pillow.
Installation is trivial:
pip install rinohtype
The easiest way to get started with rinohtype is to render a reStructuredText
document (such as CHANGES.rst from this repository) using the rinoh
command line tool:
rinoh CHANGES.rst
When rinoh finishes, you will find CHANGES.pdf alongside the input
file.
By default rinoh renders the input document using the article template. Run
rinoh --help to see how you can tell rinoh which document template and
style sheet to use.
rinohtype can be used as a drop-in replacement for the LaTeX builder (the
latex_documents configuration variable has to be set). Simply select the
rinoh builder when building the Sphinx project:
sphinx-build -b rinoh . _build/rinoh
See CONTRIBUTING.rst and DEVELOPING.rst
All of rinohtype's source code is licensed under the Affero GPL 3.0, unless
indicated otherwise in the source file (such as hyphenator.py).
The Affero GPL requires for software that builds on rinohtype to also be released as open source under this license. For building closed-source applications, you can obtain a commercial license. The author of rinohtype is also available for consultancy projects involving rinohtype.