NAME

Template::Latex::Driver - Latex driver for the Template Toolkit

SYNOPSIS

This is an internal package not intended to be used directly.

DESCRIPTION

The Template::Latex::Driver module is an internal package for the Template Toolkit Latex filter. It is used by the Template::Latex package and encapsulates the details of invoking the Latex programs.

INTERNALS

This section is aimed at a technical audience. It documents the internal methods and subroutines as a reference for the module's developers, maintainers and anyone interesting in understanding how it works. You don't need to know anything about them to use the module and can safely skip this section.

THE FORMATTING PROCESS

Formatting with LaTeX is complicated; there are potentially many programs to run and the output of those programs must be monitored to determine whether processing is complete.

The original latex filter that was part of Template Toolkit prior to version 2.16 was fairly simplistic. It created a temporary directory, copied the source text to a file in that directory, and ran either latex or pdflatex on the file once, or if postscript output was requested then it would run latex and then dvips. This did not cope with documents that contained forward references, a table of contents, lists of figures or tables, bibliographies, or indexes.

Formatting with LaTeX or PDFLaTeX

finds inputs in TEXINPUTS, TEXINPUTS_latex, TEXINPUTS_pdflatex, etc

Generating indexes

The standard program for generating indexes is makeindex.

The program makeindex is a general purpose hierarchical index generator; it accepts one or more input files (often produced by a text formatter such as TeX (tex(1L)) or troff(1), sorts the entries, and produces an output file which can be formatted.

INDEXSTYLE

Running BiBTeX

BiBTeX generates a bibliography for a LaTeX document. It reads the top-level auxiliary file (.aux) output during the running of latex and creates a bibliograpy file (.bbl) that will be incorporated into the document on subsequent runs of latex. It looks up the entries specified by \cite and \nocite commands in the bibliographic database files (.bib) specified by the \bibliography commands. The entries are formatted according to instructions in a bibliography style file (.bst), specified by the \bibliographystyle command.

Bibliography style files are searched for in the path specified by the BSTINPUTS environment variable; for bibliography files it uses the BIBINPUTS environment variable. System defaults are used if these environment variables are not set.

Running Dvips

The dvips program takes a DVI file produced by TeX and converts it to PostScript.

Running ps2pdf

Misc

kpathsea, web2c

Running on Windows

AUTHOR

Andrew Ford <a.ford@ford-mason.co.uk>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2006-2007 Andrew Ford. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

Template::Plugin::Latex, Template::Latex, makeindex(1), bibtex(1), dvips(1), The dvips manual

There are a number of books and other documents that cover LaTeX:

  • The LaTeX Companion

  • Web2c manual