LaTeX Report Automation with Makefile
Makefile are not just for C projects. You can virtualy use for automate almost any workflow with it. Due to its declarative programming style it enables depence management between generated files from several diferent sources. You just need to put the command to generate the output file and the input files required as dependence. Everything else it solved for you. So I decided to use it to automate my report generation workflow using LaTeX.
LaTeX Compilation
The basic idea is simple. Fist I create a makefile for compilation using the following template. Then I can just open a terminal and use make to compile everything. The best side of this is that the compiler will only be called when the source files is changed or the output file is missing.
Then you can integrate it with anything that you can call from terminal. Ex. You can use python inside your reports, let pandoc generate the .tex file from a markdown source, generate charts using gnuplot, … Lets try for instance to integrate an odd depence with the lastest image version from media wiki:
We can just add the new recipe
simulation.jpg:
wget -c -N --output-document==simulation.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Curved_Heatsink_Image.jpg
Then add the dependence to the report recipe:
# Generate PDF output
$(NAME).pdf: $(NAME).tex simulation.jpg
$(CC) $(CCFLAGS) $< && $(CC) $< && $(CC) $< &&\
xdg-open $(@)&
Simple as that! Now everytime you try to compile the report the makefile will first download the image from media wiki if needed then run the pdflatex. This enable a complete automated pipeline for your complete workflow with whatever tools you use.