Creating custom elements

This chapter will explain everything you need to know about the creation of an element using Elembic. It is useful not only for package authors, but interested users who would like to make reusable components in their document.

Elements, in their essence, are reusable components of the document which can be used to ensure certain parts of it share the same appearance - for example, headings, figures, as well as blocks, which are available by default.

In addition, however, elements have other properties. They can be configured by users through styles, that is, show and set rules, which can be used to, respectively, replace an element's whole appearance with some other, or change the values of some of that element's fields, if they are unspecified when the element is created.

Last but not least, Elembic can guarantee some level of type-safety by typechecking user input to element fields. Whenever you create a field, you must specify its type, which will allow Elembic to do this check.

Throughout the chapter, we will create and manipulate a sample element named "theorem".