Ever found LaTeX commands cumbersome?

Have you ever been annoyed at the number of commands necessary to rebuild one of your LaTeX projects, with all the images it includes, having had to manually convert them to the right format depending on whether you generated PDF or PostScript?

Fear no more!

LaTeX-Make is here to the rescue. Consisting of a generic GNU Makefile and a small dependency parser written in Perl, all becomes much more simple.

All you have to do is to type make texfile.pdf, and LaTeX-Make will automatically deduce the images it includes, convert them to the proper format, of course recursing into included LaTeX files, figure out whether it has to call thumbpdf to generate thumbnails and run LaTeX the necessary number of times until all is settled.

Cool, eh?

News

No news yet. Initial publication on this site.

Download

No public mirrors yet, so you can grab it directly from the author! (tar.gz, 2kb)

Supported input formats

• LaTeX
• xfig (.fig)
• GNOME Dia (.dia)
• Encapsulated Postscript (.eps)
• Portable Document Format (.pdf)

Supported output formats

• DVI
• PostScript
• Portable Document Format
• Fax (via GhostScript)

Supported LaTeX packages

• thumbpdf (thumb-nails will be automatically updated)
• graphicx (images will be automatically build from source)

Installation

The downside is that there is little or rather no documentation yet. You simply install it by copying the Makefile into your working directory or symlinking it to there, and putting the makelatexdep.pl somewhere into your path.

Calling it is very simple; if you have a LaTeX file called example.tex, you would just execute make example.pdf or make example.ps to build the desired output file.

Open issues

• Bibtex not fully supported yet.
• LaTeX, under some circumstances, might be called one time too often.

Feedback

If you like it, found it helpful or hated it, please send me some feedback at the e-mail address below.