Over the past 8 years, I needed to compile LaTeX documents for this or that reason. As time passed, I enhanced them with BibTeX, XFig, and Gnuplot. Further, I generally needed to produce PDF files validated by IEEE PDF eXpress. Here, I share some scripts I developed during the road to ease the pain.
First, note that there is a certain directory structure I stick to.
/-- LaTeX (.tex) and BibTeX (.bib) files are placed here./constants.tex-- LaTeX file for constants (variables, definitions, commands, etc.) shared between LaTeX and XFig files./make.sh-- Compiles the whole project./figs-- XFig (.fig), Gnuplot (.gnu), and EPS (.eps) files go here./figs/fig2eps.sh/figs/make.sh-- Compiles the XFig and Gnuplot into EPS format.
Below is the entry point, /make.sh. (Make sure you have latex, bibtex, dvips, and pspdf commands available.)
In /make.sh, I follow LaTeX->DVI->PostScript->PDF path. The main reason for the preference of this path over LaTeX->PDF is to properly process scalable EPS figures produced by XFig. (Personally, I hate to see broken figures in published articles.)
Next, here goes /figs/make.sh script. (Per see, gnuplot is required during execution.)
Nothing fancy in /figs/make.sh. First, we process .fig files; second, we process .gnu files.
Finally, below goes /figs/fig2eps.sh script. (Make fig2dev, pdflatex, pdf2ps commands ready. Note that /figs/fig2eps.sh requires /constants.tex for shared LaTeX variables.)
After all these fuss, the whole project boils down to
$ ./make.sh paper bibtex $ ./make.sh paper latex
and you are ready to go.
Scripts need a little bit more cleaning and they are probably the not most correct ones. Anyway, they served well until now, and I hope they would for you as well.
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