Question

I’m calling pdflatex from within my (C++) program using system(), needless to say all the garbage pdflatex puts on screen is a bit irritating in this case.

So…how do I encourage pdflatex to forego the lengthy outputs?
It would be even better if only errors would be visible…

Answer 1

To simply ignore all output, redirect pdflatex stdout to /dev/null:

system("pdflatex yourdocument >/dev/null");

You may want to add \nonstopmode at the beginning of your document to instruct tex to keep going even when encountering errors.

To get the error messages, pipe pdflatex output to your program and look for errors around rows starting with !, e.g.

FILE *outputf = popen("pdflatex yourdocument", "r");

// ... read and analyze output from outputf ...

pclose(outputf);