Introduction

The traditional way of writing recipes, and protocols for preparing many chemical reagents, is to list the ingredients needed in the first section (Ingedients or Recipes), and then present a numbered list of steps (Method). This is unfortunate as it separates verbs from the nouns on which they act: after reading what to do with an ingredient, one must refer back to a previous section in order to see how much of it is to be used. Of course, the quantity of ingredient used could be given in parentheses after each mention of its name, but this would introduce redundancy. It would also do nothing to relieve the confusion that can arise when multiple sub-mixtures are prepared, and then recombined.

One solution is the tabular arrangement used by Michael Chu on his website Cooking For Engineers, in which the names of ingredients within the instructions serve also as a unified ingredients list. However, the resulting design is a little inelegant---it uses more lines than necessary---and laborious to produce.

I have created a tool (recipeconverter.pl) that converts a lightly-formatted text file into a LaTeX snippet that can then be directly converted to a pdf by pdflatex, a freely available program. I think that the results are visually cleaner: horizontal lines are gone, replaced by indentation, and vertical lines are replaced by curly braces.

Usage

If you'd like to use it, you can download the script, or a more heavily-annotated version of the source. Then just change the extension to .pl, and run it at the command line, passing the path the file you want to convert as the only argument. It will print a blob of LaTeX code on STDOUT. This can be copied into a LateX document, or left as a fragment and converted to an image with a program like LaTeXIt (on the mac).

The syntax used in the input file is quite simple:

• Anything that comes after a hash (#) on a line will be entirely ignored.
• A line beginning with an asterisk (*) is a note, and will be output above the main recipe. It could the title of the dish, the name of the person who gave it to you, or the number of people that it serves.
• The actual recipe consists of a number of steps; each of these consists of an instruction followed by newline, a list of ingredients (separated by newlines), and a terminal newline. Here's an example step:

  		A: Cream 
  		8 oz. (225 g) unsalted butter, softened
  		1-1/2 cup (300 g) dark brown sugar
  		

  In the first line, the part before the colon means `this step will be called step A'; the second part is the instruction to the cook. The following lines list the ingredients. The whole thing is equivalent to the english sentence "Step A is to cream 8 oz. (225 g) unsalted butter, softened, and 1-1/2 cup (300 g) dark brown sugar"
• To include the results of a previous step as an ingredient in a later step, just wrap the step name in angle braces (eg.

  < A >

  But without the spaces
• Remember to include a blank line at the end of your recipe: if you don't, the last step will not be formatted.
• You can use a variety of LaTeX commands within the input (eg you can make newlines with \\, and pretty colors with the color package)
• Place a backslash before any percentage signs (write 70\%, not 70%)

Please feel free to send me any comments or suggestions.

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