Question

I’m trying to simplify/improve the Makefile for compiling my thesis. The Makefile works nicely for compiling the whole thing; I’ve got something like this:

show: thesis.pdf     open thesis.pdf  thesis.pdf: *.tex     pdflatex --shell-escape thesis 

This allows me to type make and any changes are detected (if any) and it’s recompiled before being displayed.

Now I’d like to extend it to conditionally compile only individual chapters. For example, this allows me to write make xpmt to get just a single chapter in a round-about sort of way:

xpmt: ch-xpmt.pdf     open ch-xpmt.pdf  ch-xpmt.pdf: xpmt.tex     pdflatex --shell-escape --jobname=ch-xpmt \       '\includeonly{xpmt}\input{thesis}' 

But I don’t want to have to write this down identically for each individual chapter. How can I write the rules above in a general enough way to avoid repetition?

(More of an exercise in learning how to write Makefiles rather than to solve any real problem; obviously in this case it would actually be trivial to copy and paste the above code enough times!)

Answer 1

If you have chapters named xpmt (guessing that’s ‘experiment’?) and, say, thry, anls, conc, or whatever:

xmpt thry anls conc: %: ch-%.pdf     open $<  ch-%.pdf: %.tex     pdflatex --shell-escape --jobname=ch-$* '\includeonly{$*}\input{thesis}' 

Or to do it the ‘proper’ way with make variables, I think it’d be something like this:

chapters = xmpt thry anls conc main = thesis .PHONY: $(chapters) show  show: $(main).pdf     open $<  $(main).pdf: $(main).tex $(addsuffix .tex,$(chapters))     pdflatex --shell-escape $(main)  $(chapters): %: ch-%.pdf     open $<  ch-%.pdf: %.tex     pdflatex --shell-escape --jobname=ch-$* '\includeonly{$*}\input{$(main)}'