Self-contained pandoc-xnos executable

[tomduck]

Tom,

Is it possible to build a self-contained pandoc-xnos for Windows executable
so my users do not need to install Python, the package, etc.?

Thanks,
Howard

Originally posted by @hborchew in tomduck/pandoc-tablenos#22 (comment)

[tomduck]

Hi Howard,

This is an interesting question. Pyinstaller can be used to build stand-alone executables from python scripts and their dependencies. As a test, I used pyinstaller to create a self-contained pandoc-eqnos executable on my Mac with the following command:

pyinstaller -F ~/git/pandoc-eqnos/pandoc_eqnos.py --name=pandoc-eqnos

Note that ~/git/pandoc-eqnos/ is the root directory of my pandoc-eqnos repository. The executable performs as expected. It is 5.4 MB in size, which is not too bad all things considered.

In principle, executables may be built on any OS that has python installed.

Cheers,
Tom