ANT

“ant is not TeX.”

https://github.com/Miko4/ant

by Achim Blumensath

ANT is a typesetting system written by Achim Blumensath. It resembles TeX, but improves on the language. There are no catcodes and programming happens in a "real", Haskell-alike programming language that has domain-specific features for typesetting. Other features include:

• Unicode support
• support for various font formats including Type1, TrueType, and OpenType
• partial support for advanced OpenType features;
• support for colour and graphics;
• simple page layout specifications;
• river detection.

For more information please take a look at the Manual

Building

Unfortunatly Mr. Blumensath has not updated this project since the rease of version 0.8 in late 2007, so building it is requires right now a somewhat old environmnet. But thanks to @gasche this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

First of all, install OPAM, the ocaml package-manager. It's included in most distributions or can follow the instructions on the offical Homepage.

The next thing is to install OCaml 3.10.2 and libraries needed:

opam switch install 3.10.2
opam install ocamlfind
opam install omake
opam install camlimages

After that run ./build.sh. If you need more information how to build this, take a look at the travis-ci file.

Errata

Here are some informations from the old Readme, mostly redudant and probably outdated..

In order to compile ant you need:

• OCaml version 3.10,
• OMake version 0.9.8.1,
• kpathsea version 3.2,
• FreeType version 2,
• CamlImages version 2.2-4.02, newer versions don't work yet.
• mlgmp version 0.13 (optional).

(1) You might want to edit the file “OMakefile” to set some paths. In particular, the variables KPATHSEA_LDFLAGS and KPATHSEA_CFLAGS probably need adjustment.

(2) You can choose between three number libraries:

• Float: (default) All computations use floating point numbers. This is the fastest option but it might result in rounding errors.
• Gmp: uses the mlgmp library. This gives exact results but it slower.
• Num: Is similar to Gmp but does not depend on an external library. This is the slowest option.

You can specify the number library by setting the NUM_LIB variable in the file “OMakefile”. Alternatively you can pass the corresponding option directly to omake, like:

$ omake NUM_LIB=Gmp

(3) You can specify which version of the compiler to use by setting the following variables:

• NATIVE_ENABLED: If set to “true” (default) ant is compiled to native code.
• BYTE_ENABLED: If set to “true” ant is compiled to byte code.
• NATIVE_CAMLP4: If set to “true” (default) a native version of the preprocessor camlp4 is created. This speeds up the compilation process.

(4) Finally, to compile ant type

$ omake

You might get errors about a stack overflow. In this case you can increase your stack size either by

$ ulimit -s 16384 (if you use the native compilers)

or by

$ make OCAMLRUNPARAM="l=16M" (if you use the bytecode version).

(5) Further documentation can be found in the file “manual.pdf”. The directory “Examples” contains some example ant sources including the source of the manual. Note that some of these examples use fonts not normally installed in a TeX system. To compile these documents you have to replace the corresponding \include{...} command by \include{fonts.ant} (which loads Computer Modern).

License

The original sourcecode by Blumensath is in the public domain. All newer commits are licensed under the WTFPL, or if possilbe in your jurisduction, in the public domain aswell.