bigchaindb / whitepaper

The old, out-of date, BigchainDB whitepaper. Do not read unless you want to be confused.

BigchainDB Whitepaper

This repository contains the source (LaTeX) for the original BigchainDB whitepaper, which was first published in February of 2016.

If you're looking for the main BigchainDB repository, it's at bigchaindb/bigchaindb.

And if you're really here to get a glimpse of the exciting world of LaTeX-based file generation, this repo is for you.

Using Docker

Using Docker in conjunction with Docker Compose is the recommended way so you don't have to bother with installing pdflatex, bibtex and a whole lot more LaTeX-related packages, which is especially cumbersome on macOS & Windows.

In root of this repository, simply execute:

docker-compose up

This will output the final PDFs to ./bigchaindb-whitepaper.pdf & ./bigchaindb-primer.pdf.

Generating the PDF without Docker

Build requires two binaries:

• pdflatex
• bibtex

Linux

On Linux, both binaries come as part of most LaTeX packages, we use Texlive:

sudo apt-get install -y texlive texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra pdftk

macOS

On macOS you can get both binaries as part of the BasicTex package, which can be installed manually via their package installer or via Homebrew cask:

brew cask install basictex

Now you have a whole bunch of binaries in a rather weird location. You can either symlink the required binaries to one of your PATHs, e.g. /usr/local/bin:

# create symlink for pdflatex binary in .app package
ln -s /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin/pdflatex /usr/local/bin/pdflatex
# create symlink for bibtex binary in .app package
ln -s /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin/bibtex /usr/local/bin/bibtex

Or get all the Tex tools by adding the whole folder to your PATH first:

export PATH=$PATH:/Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin

Generate the PDF

Finally, to generate the PDF in ./bigchaindb-whitepaper.pdf:

./build.sh

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.