This document describes the architecture of the speedata Publisher. Hopefully it helps to understand the logical structure of the directories and enables you to start hacking on the software itself.
When you start the speedata Publisher, you run sp(.exe) on the command line, which is a small piece of software written in Go. This command looks for a LuaTeX binary (sdluatex) in the bin directory (provided in the ZIP file) and executes it. The LuaTeX binary loads all the Lua script files and does the typesetting task.
There are two libraries loaded by the LuaTeX process, a Go library that handles XML parsing and resources loading and other stuff and a minimal C library which just makes these functions available to the Lua scripts.
The software is built using a custom build system called sphelper written in Go which allows you to build the software and the documentation.
There is also a Rakefile (requires Ruby's rake) which is mostly a wrapper for sphelper. To install sphelper, run rake sphelper, to build the software, run rake buildlib and rake build.
There are roughly four modes for the start program to run in:
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| run | This is the default mode. This starts the LuaTeX binary |
| filter | This can be used in addition to the mode run. It looks for a Lua script and executes it. |
| compare | This starts the QA mode. It recurses into a directory and compares the publisher output to a given PDF (see the manual) |
| server | The REST API described in the manual |
File lookup is done by building a file list on startup (see the Go library) and a lookup in this list. External resources are dowloaded and saved in a temporary file (see caching in the source).
The sp start program runs LuaTeX in ini mode, which does not load any formats. It disables the kpathsea-library for file lookup and instead uses its own lookup. The startup sequence loads a shared library (splib) written in Go and has a Lua-ffi wrapper for the Lua side. The TeX input file is just a small wrapper that runs the Lua script spinit. The Lua part is the typesetting part of the software.
The typesetting works basically by transforming text and other input into LuaTeXs internal data structure and let LuaTeX output the PDF. See TeX without TeX in the LuaTeX wiki for the underlying idea.
.
├── bin Testing script
├── doc Documentation source code
├── fonts Default fonts
├── img Sample images
├── lib Java helper
├── qa Quality assurance test files
├── schema XML schema (RELAX NG, XSD)
├── src Go and Lua source files
└── test unittests