grunt-tex-pdflatex

Part of the grunt-tex suite of LaTeX-orientated Grunt tasks.

This plugin can be used to compile LaTeX files into PDFs using the application pdflatex.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.5 and pdflatex to be available.

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-tex-pdflatex --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-tex-pdflatex');

The "pdflatex" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named pdflatex to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  pdflatex: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    }
  }
});

Options

options.executable

Type: String Default value: pdflatex

If pdflatex is not available on the command line as pdflatex, put it's location in this option.

options.args

Type: Object Default value: { -interaction: nonstopmode, -file-line-error: null }

An object of arguments to pass through to pdflatex as command line options. Check the pdflatex man page for all options. A few rules are applied to these arguments:

• If the value of a key is null, it will be treated a flag, i.e. it will be compiled as --option rather than --option=null
• If the key starts with - and has a value, will be used to separate the key and value
• If the key starts with -- and has a value, = will be used to separate the key and value

Without changing any arguments, pdflatex will be executed like so:

pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -file-line-error <document-name>

Usage Examples

Basic

This is the most basic usage of pdflatex:

grunt.initConfig({
  pdflatex: "document.tex"
});

Multitask with custom options

In this example, pdflatex is used as a multitask, with custom options used for the first document in order to make pdflatex output to a custom directory

grunt.initConfig({
  pdflatex: {
    options: {
      executable: "/usr/bin/pdflatex"
    },
    documentone: {
      options: {
        args: {
          "output-directory": "tmp"
        }
      },
      files: [{ src: "documentone.tex" }]
    },
    documenttwo: "documenttwo.tex"
  }
});

Compile without creating a PDF

In this example, an argument is passed to pdflatex to tell it not to turn the output into a PDF (useful if you are doing a preliminary LaTeX pass at the beginning of your build sequence).

grunt.initConfig({
  pdflatex: {
    options: {
      args: {
        "draft-mode": null
      }
    },
    files: [{ src: "document.tex" }]
  }
});

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

• 2015-01-08 v0.1.0 Initial release
• 2015-01-08 v0.1.1 Clean up unnecessary code
• 2015-01-09 v0.2.0 Change argument handling