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latex-authoring

Skill id: latex-authoring · Package: authoring-math · Named by authoring-a-paper.bpmn step 7 · Render PDF / HTML, in the Build pipeline — validate · render · publish lane.

Get a paper folio through LaTeX to a PDF, and keep the TeX a folio’s own rather than the platform’s.

Entry point. folio-paper-adapter carries latex-validation, latex-build-cache, build-pdf and build-docs; this says which to reach for and states the two rules that are easy to break from outside them.

The document render path takes no TeX — do not confuse the two

There are two render paths in this repo and they are not alternatives:

path	for	entry
LaTeX	a paper folio: math kinds, .lean siblings, typeset output	this skill → build-pdf
pandoc	a document folio, and any folio being drafted on a machine with no TeX	document_render_{md,html,pdf}

cat-harness-tools/pipeline/render-markdown.ts assembles a document folio to one Markdown file and takes it through pandoc, the PDF via weasyprint/prince/wkhtmltopdf. It never falls back to latexmk, and that is deliberate: a PDF that silently came out of LaTeX misreports what the folio needs in order to build, and the next person on a clean machine pays for it.

So: if you are here because a document folio will not render, you are in the wrong skill.

Preflight before you build

latex_preflight is the check that says whether this folio can be typeset at all — missing packages, missing fonts, an unavailable engine. Run it first. A build that fails on a missing package after twenty minutes of compilation has told you something preflight would have said immediately.

latex-validation is the per-block check; latex-build-cache is what keeps a rebuild from re-running the whole corpus.

Keep the TeX in the folio

The preamble, the class file, the macros and the bibliography style belong to the folio, not to folio-assistant. This repository is the platform: it holds the pipeline that runs LaTeX, not one paper’s \newcommands.

This has been paid for once already, in the README generator that carried one folio’s title, badges and directory layout inside a platform script and so could not run anywhere else. A macro that only one paper uses, living here, is the same defect in a different file.

“Could not determine” is a real outcome

If no TeX engine is present, the correct report is that the render was not attempted — not that it failed, and certainly not that it produced nothing because there was nothing to produce. check-deps is how you find out what the environment actually has; the capability is latex-compiler.

Processes that run this skill

process	step(s) that name it
Authoring a paper	7 · Render PDF / HTML