Question

The team I work for manages a large collection of technical documentation which is written in LaTeX.

Currently all the documentation we have is manually built by the editors and then checked into a version control system. Sometimes people forget to compile their documents so we have a situation where the PDF and .tex files are often out of step. Unfortunately when this happens our users find themselves reading old versions of our document.

I’ve managed to hack a simple script to build PDFs using Make – it’s rather clumsy.

I was wondering if there was a better way to do it? Most people in our department use Eclipse + Pydev for a Python project which means we are all very familiar with this IDE. I know that Ant plays nicely with Eclipse, so might we be able to use this tool for our doc building?

So what’s the best way of doing this? I hope I will not have to learn everything there is to know about a new build-system in order to automate the building of some quite simple docs.

Answer 1

There is an external Ant task for LaTeX PDF generation, though the site is in German.

To use it, download the jar to a location on your machine, then define a taskdef as follows:

<taskdef name="latex"    classname="de.dokutransdata.antlatex.LaTeX"  
  classpath="/path/to/ant/lib/ant_latex.jar"/> 

Then to use it, define a target like this:

<target name="doLaTeX">  
  <latex  
    latexfile="${ltx2.file}"  
    verbose="on"  
    clean="on"  
    pdftex="off"  
    workingDir="${basedir}"  
  />  
</target> 

Where ltx2.file is the file to process.

This is a link to the howto page listing the parameters. If you need any more options, my German is just about passable enough to explain, maybe.

There is also a maven plugin for LaTeX, but I can’t find any documentation.