Add support for PlantUML execution

[koppor]

PlantUML is a great tool to generate UML diagrams. Similar to pygments, one has to call an external executable. It supports converting to latex

Example:

@startuml
Bob -> Alice: hello
return Ok
@enduml

becomes:

Would it be possible to extend minted to support plantuml, too? I know that this is more than syntax highlighting. I think, however, that the treatment of executing an external tool and caching output remains very similar.

[gpoore]

This wouldn't really be appropriate for minted, since minted is focused on syntax highlighting. But the same sort of approach to caching etc. would be useful.

It might be possible to add support for something like this to pythontex, which is focused on executing code in a LaTeX document. That wouldn't be a perfect fit, because this is a little different from code execution, but it would probably be possible to get something to work.

What is really needed is a package that generalizes pythontex, to allow arbitrary text processing or code execution with external tools and built-in caching. I've been very slowly working toward something like that for a few years, but unfortunately it's a big project and my time has been limited, so I'm not close to having anything that works yet.