Remember I said that being a programmer would make you a lot more comfortable around LaTeX? The reason is quite simple, tex is just source code for a document. As with any source code in Linux (Windows too, but that is besides the point) you can use a Makefile to compile it and make your life easier.
I have already posted this Makefile in another entry but it's time to explain how it works.
all: main.pdf
main.pdf: code_frames .tex
pdflatex main.tex && pdflatex main.tex
.PHONY: run clean edit
edit:
gvim -S vim.sess
run: main.pdf
evince main.pdf &
clean:
@# for each .tex file, remove the extension
@# and delete its generated files
@for PART in $(shell ls .tex| sed 's:.tex::g'); do
echo ".out .nav .aux .toc .log .snm .pdf .vrb" | \
sed "s:*:$$PART:g" | xargs rm -f;
done
It's rather easy, let's check it target by target:
- all: create the main document - used as default target
- main.pdf: document's target - no need to call it main.pdf, I just do it because the entry point in C programs is called "main" so I'm used to it. Also, it looks better than foo.pdf. As a side note, it runs twice "pdflatex" because it first creates the document and the second time updates the document's index.
- edit: I usually have a single document split in many files, so keeping a line to quickly open up your editor with all this files is handy. I just keep it as a Vim session, no need for more
- run: target to open up the document in a pdf viewer. I call it run so I can use it with my default mapping in Vim
- clean: clean up the files created while compiling a document. Some times it's needed if there's an error you can track - it may be a corrupted .aux file
Short entry this time - next: using source code from within LaTeX.