The Road to TexCore `v1.0.0`

I developed TexCore, our Rust crate to write Latex natively in Rust using Rust types. It is built to be simple: you add different Elements to a list, and it all joins together, and boom, you have a Latex document.

Currently, the library is at v0.7.2 and, at the time of writing, has 14,229 total downloads. However, I took a break from developing it further because the way the elements worked was becoming increasingly complex and less scalable. Certain problems just had workarounds but weren't practical. When you have a v1.0, the library is stable—a production-ready library!

So what is our road to this maturity is the following, and this involves having previous uses of this library pretty much be depreciated:

• Feature a full LaTeX AST (Abstract Syntax Tree)

  • This will feature simple ways to convert to LaTeX and Rust using from() and to_string() methods.

  • Be able to easily write complex LaTeX code in Rust using from to parse the string.

    • With a full error handling type, we also hope to catch syntax errors and report them when building a LaTeX document, and can be a way for TexCreate to verify a template.

• I will take inspiration from previous versions of simplifying some nodes by bundling them in a separate module.

• Improved documentation guide and a dedicated website (texcore.mokareads.org)

• We will be moving away TexCreate templates into a dedicated texcreate_packager crate that will take over the role of the texcreate_templates feature and texc_repo crate, and will be incharge of the package management role of the application.

This will be a lot of work, and I will need 2024 alone just for planning, along with my other commitments and TexCreate v4; I will honestly say there won't be progress for a while. I hope to get others involved with this project and make it easy for contributors to get involved with an issue system to pin the goals we need to complete.

I will create a new branch dev_v1.0 that will be dedicated to the development of this. There's a lot of baggage to clear, a lot of ideas to figure out and iron out, but the dream is there, we will finally bring TexCore at v1.0 as the first step of our massive TexCreate v4 update.