This page contains a collection of Makefile rules and other snippets.

In case you use John Collin's excellent latexmk script, the rule is extremely simple:

%.pdf : %.tex
  latexmk -pdf $<

Similarly, to generate .ps files, use

%.ps : %.tex
  latexmk -ps $<

The script handles things such as recessary re-runs of LaTeX and calling BiBTeX automatically and transparently.

In case you don't use latexmk, or if you want to make your Makefile usable for people who don't, the following, slightly more complex Makefile should do the job.

LATEX = latex
PDFLATEX = pdflatex
BIBTEX = bibtex
EGREP = egrep
EGFLAGS = "-c"

RERUN = "Label\(s\) may have changed"
RERUNBIB = "No file.*\.bbl|Citation.*undefined"

%.pdf: %.tex
 $(PDFLATEX) $<
 $(EGREP) $(EGFLAGS) $(RERUNBIB) $*.log && ($(BIBTEX) $*; $(PDFLATEX) $<); true
 $(EGREP) $(RERUN) $*.log && $(PDFLATEX) $<; true
 $(EGREP) $(RERUN) $*.log && $(PDFLATEX) $<; true
 # Display relevant warnings, including the following line
 egrep -i -A 1 "LaTeX.*Warning" $*.log ; true

To generate .ps files without latexmk, you will need a rule similar to the one above, that generates a .dvi file from a .tex file, and a second rule that uses dvips to generate the .ps file; however this is not provided here, at least for the moment.

The following assumes that the MATLAB file is a script, not a function, and that it includes code to print a figure to an .eps file of the same name. (See also this article).

%.eps : %.m
  matlab -nodisplay -nojvm < $< > /dev/null

Note: In MATLAB version 7.4, it seems the script needs to contain an exit statement at the end, or MATLAB will not exit. In previous versions, MATLAB exits upon encountering the end of the file.

%.pdf : %.eps
  eps2pdf $<

This requires the transfig package, in particular the fig2dev command. There are two rules involved. The first rule converts the .fig file (without text) to a .pdf file, and the second rule creates the file containing the corresponding LaTeX code.

%.pdf : %.fig
  fig2dev -L pdftex $< $@

%_t : %.fig
  echo -e "\\\\begin{picture}(0,0)%\n\\\\epsfig{file=$(patsubst %.fig,%,$<)}%\n\\\\end{picture}%"\
   > $@
  fig2dev -L pdftex_t $< >> $@

The line starting with echo makes sure that all you need to do in the LaTeX file is type

\input{file_t}

(If you had exported the figure manually from xfig, the above code (\begin{picture}…) would have been automatically included in the _t file. I don't know why fig2dev doesn't do this automatically.)

Note: It can happen that, depending on the XFig page settings, the figure appears rotated by 90 degrees. In that case, you need to use the following line to generate the .pdf file from the .fig file:

  fig2dev -L pdftex -p1 $< $@

This is almost equal to the previous case, except that you have to slightly change the parameters given to fig2dev, and you need to replace pdf by ps in the filenames.

There are two rules involved. The first rule converts the .fig file (without text) to a .pdf file, and the second rule creates the file containing the corresponding LaTeX code.

%.ps : %.fig
  fig2dev -L pstex $< $@

%_t : %.fig
  echo -e "\\\\begin{picture}(0,0)%\n\\\\epsfig{file=$(patsubst %.fig,%,$<)}%\n\\\\end{picture}%"\
   > $@
  fig2dev -L pstex_t $< >> $@

The line starting with echo makes sure that all you need to do in the LaTeX file is type

\input{file_t}

(If you had exported the figure manually from xfig, the above code (\begin{picture}…) would have been automatically included in the _t file. I don't know why fig2dev doesn't do this automatically.)

Note: You can combine these rules, so that they work transparently with both latex and pdflatex, to create .ps and .pdf files, respectively.