YouClid

Geometric Notation for Everyone

Joseph Sweeney, Drew Monroe, Ian Dechene, Sailesh Simhadri, Soumya Kundu

Dependencies

• python3.6

Installation

pip3 install git+git://github.com/YouClid/youclid.git@master#egg=youclid

Examples

You can see examples of the parser in action at our website.

Creating a Markup

The format for creating a markup file is specified in yc-format.txt. We also have documentation located here In general, the text that should be interpreted by the parser must be enclosed in brackets, like so: [line AB] The parser currently supports the following data types:

• point
• line
• circle
• polygon

Arguments to the data types are space separated keyword arguments. The first argument to each data type must be the name of the object (which currently must be one letter point names that make up the object). The center keyword can be used to specify the center point for a circle. At the bottom of the file, the loc keyword must be used to give the points coordinates (floating point numbers between -1 and 1 inclusive), where (0, 0) is the center of the canvas. To mark where this part of the document starts, it must be preceded by a [Definitions] tag. We have provided an example file in frontend/texts/postulate1.yc which can be used as a reference.

Running the parser

To run the parser, which will generate HTML from your markup, simply run the following command, replacing the first argument with the path to your .yc file, and use the -o argument to specify an output file

youclid /path/to/marked/up/yc/file -o output.html

If you wish to specify transitions between steps in your text, simply include a \[step\] command. Any objects created between \[step\] commands will be displayed as one transition.

If you wish to distribute the generated HTML to another user, you can use the --final argument to create a distributable file.

Step-by-Step Example

Let's say that you wish to create a diagonal line across the screen. Start by making a file called line.yc with the following contents:

This text won't be marked up, since it's not enclosed in bracketes!
This is [line AB], which is made up of [point A] and [point B].

[loc A x=-0.75 y=-0.75]
[loc B x=0.75 y=0.75]

The first line won't be interpreted by our parser, since it doesn't have any markup. The second line will create a line named AB, which will consist of point A and point B. While we do specify these points later on, they are implicitly created upon creation of line AB. This means that you don't even need any of the text after the comma on the second line! The lines after the blank line give the points locations. Point A is given the coordinates (-0.75, 0.75) and point B is given the coordinates (0.75, 0.75).

All that is left to do is generate the HTML; simply run the following command

youclid /path/to/marked/up/yc/file -o output.html

Now, you can open the HTML file in your browser, and you should see a line!

If you wish to specify colors for a particular object, you can do so directly in the markup, as follows:

[line AB color=ffffffff]

Where the hex values are of the form RGBA (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). If you do not specify an Alpha, it will be assumed to be ff.

Syntax Highlighting

We plan on creating syntax files for popular text editors. Currently, the only syntax files we have created are for vim and atom.

Vim

In order to utilize the provided syntax files, create the following directory structure in your home directory (if it does not already exist) by running the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/ftdetect
mkdir -p ~/.vim/after/syntax

Next, run the following commands to create symlinks to our relevant syntax files, replacing the /path/to/youclid with the absolute path to the directory where you cloned our repository

ln -s /path/to/youclid/colors/vim/ftdetect/yc.vim ~/.vim/ftdetect/yc.vim
ln -s /path/to/youclid/colors/vim/after/syntax/yc.vim ~/.vim/after/syntax/yc.vim

The syntax file should pull colors from your vim color scheme. If you wish to customize the colors, we utilize the following definitions:

• YouclidKeyword
• YouclidMarker
• YouclidText
• YouclidName

Atom

In order to utilize the provided syntax files, create the following directory structure in your home directory (if it does not exist) by running the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.atom/packages

Next, run the following commands to create symlinks to our package, replacing /path/to/youclid with the absolute path to the directory where you cloned our repository

ln -s /path/to/youclid/colors/atom/language-youclid ~/.atom/packages/language-youclid

If you wish to customize the colors, our .less file is located in colors/language-youclid/styles/youclid.less.