karlotness / TeXdep

Auto dependencies for LaTeX and Make

TeXdep - Auto dependencies for LaTeX and Make

TeXdep produces Make rules listing dependencies for LaTeX files in a given project. If you use LaTeX with Make (particularly GNU Make) to build external figures and other resources, then this script might be of use.

Currently TeXdep lists files referenced in \input, \include, and \includegraphics macros.

Usage

Make sure texdep.sh is accessible from your Makefile. The easiest way to do this is to include it in your project's source code. After you have done this you need to include it in your Makefile build.

TeXdep locates dependencies in two steps, for each .tex source file a .texdep file will be created listing the files referenced in that file directly. These will then be recursively gathered into a .d dependency file with a Make-formatted rule. A set of rules like those listed below will use TeXdep to find dependencies, assuming your Makefile builds document.pdf from a set of TeX source files in the top-level directory.

TEXFILES=$(wildcard *.tex)

include document.d

%.texdep: %.tex texdep.sh
	./texdep.sh dep $< > $@

%.d: $(TEXFILES:.tex=.texdep) texdep.sh
	./texdep.sh gather document.pdf document.texdep > $@

These rules should be modified for your particular set of build steps and can be used alongside latexmk to run the LaTeX build step after all dependencies are up to date. The %.texdep rule produces the dependency lists for each TeX source file. The next rule gathers these into a Make rule specifying dependencies for document.pdf starting the recursion with the files listed in document.texdep.

Alternatives

One alternative to this script is to use latexmk's -MF flag. This script accomplishes basically the same task except that it looks at the TeX source itself and does not require TeX to finish with the project before listing dependencies. This has approach is a bit more resilient to cases where your project may not fully build when dependencies are missing and in cases where having latexmk call Make on its own may be undesirable. However, this also means that system TeX files will not be listed and that the listing of dependencies is less thorough.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT license. The license text is included in the source file and also in LICENSE.txt.