SCons for Latex

Latex is really great for publishing papers with nicely typeset equations and graphics. It automates all of the little formatting stuff and lets you spend time developing the content of your paper rather than wasting effort fiddling with format. I've been using GNU Make for years to process my Latex sources into dvi's and pdf's, but it's always been pretty painful and clumsy (mostly because I'm not a Make guru).

The makefiles for a Latex document can get pretty ugly and complicated especially if your document depends on various data or graphics files. SCons is a new and improved build-tool that implements its configuration files as Python scripts, the file is called SConstruct now instead of Makefile. The great thing from my point of view is that it has built-in support for Latex. Making a pdf from my Latex source file is simple:

env = Environment()
env.PDF('main.tex')

The PDF builder is smart enough to know it needs to run pdflatex and then based on the output possibly run bibtex and then pdflatex again to track down undefined references (or not). All in two lines of Python.

The really neat thing is how easy it is to extend the built-in build environments.

env = Environment()
plot_bld = Builder(action = 'gnuplot < $SOURCE > $TARGET,
suffix = '.png'
src_suffix = '.gp')
env.Append(BUILDERS = {'Plot' : plot_bld})
env.PDF('main.tex')

Now my SCons can automatically update my png graphics files based on gnuplot commands in any files ending with .gp.

Practical Development Environments has a nice little write-up in Chapter 5 about SCons.