LaTeX: Makefile

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.