benide / reproducible-latex

Nix flake template for reproducible latex documents

This uses a modification of the flake from this blog post as a template. It’s been modified to include synctex.

Using the template

To set up your flake, run:

nix flake init -t github:benide/reproducible-latex

In the generated flake.nix, change the variable documentName to the name of your tex file without the .tex.

The document can be built with a call to nix build. The resulting pdf and synctex.gz files appear in the linked result folder.

Package and NixOS Module

This flake outputs a default package that is just texlive, but using the same lockfile that’s in the template. This way you can install the same version of texlive on your system that your reproducible documents use. This way the nix store only needs one copy of texlive, which makes using texlive.combined.scheme-full not use up too much space. This can be installed in a non-NixOS profile via:

nix profile install github:benide/reproducible-latex

There is also a NixOS module. Here is an example flake for a NixOS config that uses this module:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = nixpkgs/nixos-unstable;
    reproducible-latex.url = github:benide/reproducible-latex;
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, reproducible-latex, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations = {
      hostname = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
        system = "x86_64-linux";
        modules = [
          ./configuration.nix
          reproducible-latex.nixosModule
        ];
      };
    };
  };
}

Synctex details

Synctex doesn’t like to use relative paths. The perl in the installPhase of the template changes everything to relative paths. To make this work, your editing environment needs to know that the output directory is result/.

If you use Emacs, there is a .dir-locals.el file included that sets the correct output directory for AucTeX and sets the default build command to Nix build. The default command only makes sense if your emacs config actually has that. Here’s what I have:

(add-to-list 'TeX-command-list
             '("Nix build" "nix build" TeX-run-compile nil (latex-mode)
               :help "Use nix to build"))