I've been developing a Makefile for LaTeX on the base of Chris Monson's Makefile for LaTeX (see also the project page at Google Code). My approach is different from his:

  • I abuse conditionals in the Makefile and tries to exploit the file change detection of (GNU) make
  • I do not want to make too many assumptions about how people deal with their graphic files
  • I also abuse intermediate files
  • I try to be more portable (Linux, Cygwin, MacOSX, FreeBSD)
  • I want my Makefile to be able to be included in other Makefiles (not tested, but I am confident this functionality is almost there)
  • I also added test cases showing expliciting what I want to work well with this Makefile

The minimal requirements for this Makefile to work are:

  • An installation of LaTeX with latex, pdflatex
  • Some basic Unix utilities: sed, cp, mv, etc

Additional requirements include:

  • Bibtex, makeindex, thumbpdf
  • dvips, dvipdfm, pdftops

You can explore the git repository through this Web interface. If you want to clone the git repository, just do in a terminal:

git clone git://github.com/scolin/latex-makefile.git

If you want to download specific versions:

Needless to say, you use the development version at your own expense.