Noteface is a Sinatra application for managing the compilation and distribution of LaTeX documents that are updated in a Git repository (on GitHub) frequently.
Noteface compiles a PDF every time a change in a .tex file is committed to a particular repository on GitHub. It then allows others to download those PDFs, and it tracks downloads with Mixpanel.
- Install Redis (
brew install redis). - Install LaTeX, preferably from source.
git clone git@github.com:christhomson/noteface.gitcd notefacebundle installcp config/settings.yml.sample config/settings.yml- Place all your secrets in
config/settings.yml. bundle exec shotgun
You can run the tests with bundle exec rake test.
I have a public repository of my lecture notes, and it contained the .tex source files and the corresponding compiled .pdf files.
However, I wanted to stop committing PDF files to the repository for a number of reasons:
- Storing binary files that change constantly in Git seems a bit fugly since you can't easily perform a useful
diffon them. - If someone wants to make a correction, they currently have to correct it in the .tex source and either install LaTeX and compile the PDF (and I have to assume the PDF is a reasonable representation of the .tex), or just commit the .tex and I'll have to compile and commit the PDF separately.
Instead, Noteface is a web service that performs all the compilations automatically. Noteface provides an endpoint that GitHub can hit through a post-receive hook which will trigger compiles of all the documents that were added or modified.
In addition, I thought having some basic download statistics would be nice, and Noteface helps out with that. It sends download events to Mixpanel for analysis.
Finally, since Noteface compiles the PDF files after a commit is made, we can include the commit's day/time and SHA in the PDF content. This is useful for people who download and save the PDF and want to know how outdated their version is.