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About

TeXSmith was originally created by Yves Chevallier in 2025 to address the need for a seamless workflow between Markdown-based documentation and -based publishing, initially for his own academic courses at HEIG-VD.

Aside from Pandoc—written in Haskell and not directly suited for MkDocs—there were no tools capable of converting MkDocs-flavored Markdown into while preserving the original content’s semantic intent.

Because developing such an ambitious toolchain was a substantial and time-consuming effort, I postponed the project until I discovered the remarkable power of OpenAI Codex, which helped me bootstrap the initial version of TeXSmith in just a few days. I wanted to extract the core MkDocs-to- code used in my online course and turn it into a standalone, general-purpose tool that anyone needing to convert MkDocs content to could use. That is how TeXSmith was born.

Branding

This project is not affiliated with , , or the Project. It merely produces -compatible output and interacts with the toolchain in the same way any document-generation utility would. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

By convention within the community, the names and are used with care. Donald Knuth famously stated:

“ is not to be changed; only Knuth himself may change .”

This is not a legal trademark declaration but a long-standing cultural rule: any system that calls itself must be fully compatible with Knuth’s canonical implementation. Similarly, the Project requires that only implementations conforming to the format may use the name .

In keeping with these established norms, this project does not claim to be a or implementation, nor does it modify or replace them. It is simply a tool that generates code as output, leaving the actual typesetting to standard, community-maintained engines.