How to share stylesheets (with a preview)?

Question

I have never understood how to easily generate an image preview for a given stylesheet. I also am unclear on how to easily share one. So I'm looking for an implementation or good 3rd party solution for functions to do these things:

StyleSheetPreview[location] (*or StyleSheetBrowse[loc] for loc in wolfram cloud that has many styles*)

Would give something like the built-in styles previewer:

And this would give a way to share them:

StyleSheetShare["newstylesheet"] (*uploads it to wolfram cloud*)
StyleSheetInstall["newstylesheet", "Uninstall" -> True|False] 
(*downloads and installs from wolfram cloud*)

I’ve noticed a number of ResourceFunctions that exist to install things (e.g. GitHubInstall). Might this be a good way to share stylesheets? Or is there another more modern way to create, preview, and deliver them stylesheets?

Answer 1

Preview Notebooks / Extra Paclet Features

I decided it was worth it to add some extra features to this thing as it's a good example of what paclets can do for you.

First off, I added a little CreateStylesheetPreview function that'll take stylesheets and rasterize them to make a preview. e.g.:

CreateStylesheetPreview[
  {"Default.nb", "ReverseColor.nb" -> "Custom/CodeNotebook.nb"}
  ] // CreateDocument

(Read the source code to see how it's implemented. It's not particularly complex stuff.)

Then I made it so that you can "Include" arbitrary content in your paclet, so we'll add this as a palette. I'll do that as a directory, just to show how it works. Other content can be included directly as files, but I wanted to support both. First we'll create a directory containing the palettes of interest:

Quiet@
  CreateDirectory["~/Desktop/Palettes/Custom/", 
   CreateIntermediateDirectories -> True];
Export[
  "~/Desktop/Palettes/Custom/CodeNotebookPreview.nb",
  CreateStylesheetPreview[
   {"Default.nb", "ReverseColor.nb" -> "Custom/CodeNotebook.nb"}
   ]
  ];

then we can bundle and share it like so:

StylesheetShare[
 sheets[[1]],
 "Includes" -> {
   "~/Desktop/Palettes/Custom" -> "FrontEnd/Palettes/Custom",
   "~/Desktop/StylesheetShare.wl"
   },
 "PackageContext" -> {"StylesheetShare`"}
 ]

CloudObject["https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/b3m2a1.testing/Paclets/CodeNotebook-1.0.0.paclet"]

You'll notice I also included the package that implements this stuff in there, just for the heck of it.

When you install it, since I didn't bump the "Version" in the Options, if you have an old version installed you'll need to install it like so:

StylesheetInstall["CodeNotebook", "IgnoreVersion" -> True]

Paclet[CodeNotebook, 1.0.0, <>]

Once it's installed you'll see two changes from before, first, in the palettes menu we have this:

which just opens up that preview notebook from before.

Second, we can find that installed package:

FindFile["StylesheetShare`"] // StringTrim[#, $UserBasePacletsDirectory] &

"/Repository/CodeNotebook-1.0.0/Include/StylesheetShare.wl"

And so at that point you could just do <<StylesheetShare` to load the package

If you want to distribute multiple packages you can do that by adding their names to the "PackageContext" list.

Original

Wrote up a package to do the sharing.

First load the package from GitHub:

Get["https://github.com/b3m2a1/mathematica-tools/raw/master/StylesheetShare.wl"]

This exposes two functions, StylesheetShare and StylesheetInstall

Next get some sheets to share. Here are a few that are already in a package of mine:

stylesheetsDir = 
  "~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools";

sheets =
 FileNames[
  "*.nb", 
  stylesheetsDir
  ]

(* Out:

{
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/CodeNotebook.nb,
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/CodePackage.nb,
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/CodePackagePlain.nb,
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/DocGen.nb,
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/MarkdownNotebook.nb,
 ~/Documents/Wolfram Mathematica/Applications/BTools/FrontEnd/StyleSheets/BTools/SyntaxHighlighting.nb
 }

*)

Then we can share a single sheet:

StylesheetShare[
 sheets[[1]]
 ]

CloudObject["https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/b3m2a1.testing/Paclets/CodeNotebook-1.0.0.paclet"]

And then install that:

StylesheetInstall[
 "CodeNotebook", 
 "WolframID" -> "b3m2a1.testing"
 ]

Paclet[CodeNotebook,1.0.0,<>]

Or you can share the entire directory:

StylesheetShare[
 stylesheetsDir,
 "Name" -> "MySheets"
 ]

CloudObject["https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/b3m2a1.testing/Paclets/MySheets-1.0.0.paclet"]

There are a bunch of little settings you can use in StylesheetShare if you want:

Options[StylesheetShare]

{"Version" -> "1.0.0", "Name" -> Automatic, "Creator" -> Automatic, 
 "Description" -> "A stylesheets paclet", 
 "BuildDirectory" :> CreateDirectory[], "MenuName" -> "Custom", 
 "PacletsRoot" -> "", Permissions -> "Public", AppearanceElements -> All, 
 AutoCopy -> False, CloudObjectNameFormat -> Automatic, 
 CloudObjectURLType -> Automatic, IconRules -> Automatic, 
 MetaInformation -> {}, SharingList -> {}, SourceLink -> Automatic}

But that should be enough to get you started