I have just been investigating the state of the art for LaTeX support. As far as I can tell there's nothing official; the most "official" things I can find are some unwritten documentation in the autotoolset manual:
http://autotoolset.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html and this project suggestion by Akim Demaille with the apparent knowledge of Alexandre Duret-Lutz: http://www.lrde.epita.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Epita/ProjetsLibres#Automake_LaTeX_Support_and_tests which given their involvement in auto* suggests nothing has been done (although the page I quote is a few years out of date). I've just been autotooling up an old build system of mine from 15 years ago, and needed to build several LaTeX documents of modest complexity, and had no desire to fake up the relevant Make rules. I looked into several LaTeX builder scripts. I first tried LaTeX-mk, which is a Perl script optionally augmented by some Makefile fragments. I ignored the Makefile fragments as they need either GNU Make or "a BSD make program". LaTeX-mk itself, which I've used successfully for some time to build PDFs on the fly for my personal web site, sadly seems to break down in parallel builds. LaTeX-make looks better, as it uses what is says is a generic Makefile, but integrating that would've required writing support for automake. (The fact of being written in Make is not really an advantage.) I have used earlier versions of Wybo Dekker's "mk", but the current version is written in Ruby, which is a bit of an annoying dependency. Finally, I found latexmk (which took some disambiguating) by John Collins: http://www.phys.psu.edu/~collins/software/latexmk-jcc/ This is a single Perl script, so I can at least require it in maintainer mode. Since this seems to be good practice for LaTeX documents anyway, since otherwise users must have a full LaTeX system installed, and LaTeX can be quite fiddly, I thought it a reasonable compromise to distribute PDF files as EXTRA_DIST. It worked in parallel and VPATH builds (i.e. make distcheck with MAKEFLAGS containing "-j 2" was no problem), and I ended up with the following rules: PAPER_SRCS = \ $(srcdir)/foo.tex \ $(srcdir)/bar.tex \ ... PAPER_PDFS = \ $(builddir)/foo.pdf \ $(builddir)/bar.pdf \ ... pdf-local: $(PAPER_PDFS) mostlyclean-local: $(LATEXMK) -c $(PAPER_SRCS) # This would be clean-local, but we distribute the PDFs maintainer-clean-local: $(LATEXMK) -C $(PAPER_SRCS) EXTRA_DIST = $(PAPER_SRCS) $(PAPER_PDFS) .tex.pdf: $(LATEXMK) -pdf $< I'd be interested to know if this is of any interest for automake. (latexmk is distributed under the GPL, and has a single author, so there's a chance of a copyright assignment, should that be important, though I haven't asked the author about it.) To really support it properly in automake, some work would obviously be needed to add for example a LATEXS primary, with suitable prefix for installation under ${datadir}/doc, and some version of all the rules above, presumably with the different default that the PDF files are not distributed, as for texinfo, so that I could write simply: doc_LATEXS = foo.tex bar.tex EXTRA_DIST = foo.pdf bar.pdf And I guess there would be a certain amount of pain making the `pdf' target work for LaTeX and texinfo; are there other cases in which suffixes are shared between different toolchains? -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
