Command-Line Tool

The Scala Native build links a standalone texish executable that turns a source document into a PDF (or one PNG per page) using the Cairo backend.

texish [options] [input-file]

  input-file                    texish source to typeset; reads standard input if omitted
  -o, --output <file>           output path (default: beside the input file, or out)
  -t, --type <pdf | png>        output type (default: pdf)
  -p, --paper <a4 | letter>     paper size (default: letter)
  -r, --resolution <sd|hd|fhd|dpi>  PNG device resolution (default: hd)

The resolution is either a named size — sd (96 dpi), hd (150 dpi) or fhd (300 dpi) — or a positive DPI number. Because the engine measures in points (72 per inch), -r 72 makes one point render as exactly one pixel, so a document laid out in points reads directly in pixels — convenient for fixed-size raster targets such as video frames.

Examples

texish doc.texish                       # writes doc.pdf
texish doc.texish -o paper -p a4        # writes paper.pdf on A4
texish doc.texish -t png -r fhd         # writes doc.png (or doc_1.png, doc_2.png, …)
texish frame.texish -t png -r 72        # 1 point = 1 pixel: a 1280x720pt page is a 1280x720 PNG
cat doc.texish | texish -o doc          # read the source from standard input

PDF is the default output. A single-page document writes name.png; a multi-page document writes name_1.png, name_2.png, and so on.

Fonts and packages

The core faces are compiled into the binary: Latin Modern (roman body with its bold, italic, slanted and small-caps cuts, plus the sans and typewriter roles), Latin Modern Math, New Computer Modern as the glyph-fallback face, and JetBrains Mono for \code listings. The base and document packages are compiled in too. So texish renders an ordinary document — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, mathematics, highlighted source code — from any directory with nothing installed and nothing configured.

The rest is too large for that, and lives in a fonts/ and a packages/ folder: the complex-script faces, the CJK cuts, the alternative text families, the SMuFL music faces, and every package beyond those two.

An installed texish finds its own. On startup it locates its own executable and looks upward for a share/texish/ directory, or a fonts//packages/ beside it. A package that installs the binary and the tree therefore needs no wrapper script and no environment variable, and it works the same invoked by absolute path, through $PATH, or through a package manager’s link farm.

Every release attaches that tree as texish-<version>-share.tar.gz, which unpacks to share/texish/fonts and share/texish/packages. Unpack it at the prefix holding bin/texish and the binary finds it — see Installation.

Otherwise a font path is looked for beside the document and then in the current working directory (so running from the texish source tree just works), and a module beside the document, in the current directory, and in ./packages/. $TEXISHHOME remains as a fallback for a tree kept somewhere none of that finds:

TEXISHHOME=/opt/texish texish doc.texish   # reads /opt/texish/fonts/… and /opt/texish/packages/…

A document that asks for a family this installation does not have is told which font file was missing, at the point it asks, rather than rendering silently wrong:

typeface 'hebrew' is one texish bundles, but its font files were not found —
no font source has 'fonts/NotoSerifHebrew/NotoSerifHebrew-Regular.ttf'

Building the binary

sbt texishCli/nativeLink

The executable is produced at cli/target/scala-3.8.4/texish-cli.

Links and images in PDF output

Clickable links (\href / \url) become real PDF link annotations only in PDF output — the PNG backend draws the link text but carries no annotation. \includegraphics reads PNG everywhere and JPEG through the libjpeg-turbo binding on the native backend.