Hacker News Reader

Not really answering your question but you could consider generating postscript output and then using ghostscript to convert it to pdf. That would let you create and write arbitrary stuff. I think pandoc uses pdflatex to generate a pdf via latex from the internal pandoc representation.

Imagemagick also writes to pdf I believe, but it may only convert raster images. With postscript you can generate a vector pdf

View on HN

Hello. My project is essentially a replacement for a small subset of LaTeX. I use LaTeX for a lot of my own work but the massive amount of converters going from LaTeX to PDF is the reason I started this project in the first place.

Understood. Is your project open source? I'm curious to see what the solution looks like when you sort it out. I feel like there must be a lot of heavy lifting (but also a lot of cruft if all you care about is a narrow case) being done by pdflatex to get to an output pdf. It will be interesting to see what the minimal solution looks like.

Hello. It will be open source once I release it -- I am hoping by August, since I have the summer off by a stroke of luck.

Imagemagick just shells out to ghostscript.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com