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Friant.dev

David A. Friant, PhD Nuclear Physics
May 29th, 2026
About
This is where I put the things that I want to share with the world from both my professional career and my personal adventures. Both in the sidebar and below this you will find links to my works and projects, all organized as best I can manage.

Recent Works

Operator Language:
Design Goals and Intent

2026-05-29

One of the minor inconveniences of C and C++ is the small selection of operators allowed for use within the language. This limits the ability of programmers to express certain ideas, especially those involving formal logic and set theory, in clear and compact ways. This article lays out the beginnings of a project to create a new programming language, Operator, in the C-Family that addresses this and several other minor issues which could be resolved with the aid of full Unicode support and a specialized compiler.

Keywords: Programming Language, Operator, Lexical Analysis, Unicode Support

This Website:
Styling With CSS

2026-05-09

As has been alluded to many times in the preceeding articles, CSS is heavily used to ensure a clean and consistent style across the website while also providing certain functionalities which would be very difficult to achieve in plain HTML. Style-wise, colors and fonts are discussed. Functionality-wise, changing color modes, tool-tip behavior, syntax highlighting, code line numbering, and image scaling are all discussed.

Keywords: LaTeX, Make4ht, Styling, CSS, IndieWeb

This Website:
Raster and Vector Images

2026-04-12

Raster and vector images are fundamental pieces of media which must be well-handled in the process of converting LaTeX documents to HTML documents. Fortunately, this more-or-less the case with the default or near-default behavior of Make4ht. However, the special case of TIKZ and PGFplot images raises certain concerns which must be addressed in order to maintain a consistent look and feel across both the light and dark color modes of the website. A combination of the Externalization TIKZ package, the Inkscape vector drawing program, and some clever post-processing are presented in this article to fully address those concerns.

Keywords: LaTeX, Make4ht, Raster Images, Vector Images, IndieWeb

This Website:
Code, Minted, and Pygments

2026-03-28

Syntax highlighting for code listings is a a critical feature of any website which needs to display large amounts of code. To that end, the Minted package for LaTeX provides excellent support for it in the generation of pdf documents. However, the default output of Make4ht when using it is in need of some modification. Minted is based upon the the Pygments Python library which will be called directly in the customize of the syntax highlighting process.

Keywords: LaTeX, Make4ht, Code, Syntax Highlighting, IndieWeb

This Website:
Equations and Tables

2026-03-22

Equations and tables are key content types for this website that must be well handled. Fortunately, the translation of mathematical typsetting from LaTeX to HTML is handled extremely well by Make4ht, making the process nearly entirely painless. Unfortunately, the same can not be said for tables, though this is largely a consequence of the fundamentally different nature of how LaTeX and HTML tables are respectively defined. The bulk of this article is dedicated to detailing in some depth the process used to complete the translation process in a satisfactory manner.

Keywords: LaTeX, Make4ht, Equations, Tables, IndieWeb