LaTeX Helper scripts

My personal bash scripts to make LaTeX academic writing easier

I've been writing all my academic papers using LaTeX lately, and noticed that compiling pdflatex several times and then calling on biblatex in between those was very time consuming, and-or resource consuming by using the GUI version of TeXshop on Mac. Another issue I used to have was trying to run latexdiff on my papers and having it crash because of tables, section titles, footnotes or long citations. So I used to have a latexdiff call method just written somewhere to copy paste. I finally made it into a script with flag options for the times I want to change the use a little bit.

latexcompile.sh and my_latexdiff.sh use nhoffman's argparse.bash, so make sure to see his README for help if necessary.

By dependency, and according to nhoffman:

Python 2.6+ or 3.2+ is required. See https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/argparse.html for a description of the python module. Note that some of the Python module's features won't work as expected (or at all) in this simplistic implementation.

Installation

In short, download all the files, move them to the directory where your '*.tex' file is and make the scripts executable.

Long version:

Get argparse.bash:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nhoffman/argparse-bash/main/argparse.bash
chmod +x argparse.bash

Then do the same for my files as well:

wget https://github.com/elisa-aleman/latex_helpers/raw/main/latexcompile.sh
wget https://github.com/elisa-aleman/latex_helpers/raw/main/mylatexdiff.sh
wget https://github.com/elisa-aleman/latex_helpers/raw/main/recursive_clean_latex_secondary_files.sh
chmod +x latexcompile.sh
chmod +x mylatexdiff.sh
chmod +x recursive_clean_latex_secondary_files.sh

wget is Unix only, and at first only usable in Linux. To use in Mac get it with Homebrew:

brew install wget

If you don't have Homebrew, click here, or just do the following:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

If you're behind a proxy and can't install Homebrew, first configure your git proxy settings:

git config --global http.proxy http://{PROXY_HOST}:{PORT}

Replace your {PROXY_HOST} and your {PORT}.

Then install homebrew using proxy settings as well:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -x {PROXY_HOST}:{PORT} -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Usage

LaTeX Quick Compile

I like to use these files to do my LaTeX work faster. For example to view my current progress in PDF:

./latexcompile.sh paper.tex --view --clean --leavebbl

--view will open the pdf after all citations have been read with bibtex and --clean will remove all the secondary files that pdflatex makes, like '.blg', '.bbl', '.aux', '.log', '.thm', '.out', and sometimes '.spl' when using the class elsarticle from Elsevier. --leavebbl will stop --clean from deleting the '.bbl' file, which is useful for arxiv uploads or to count bibliography. However it's not always needed so I still left it in --clean

Making latexdiff easier

A problem I kept running into with latexdiff is that I like to have a very specific naming system. All my older files have an _V#-# ending marking the version. For example, version 1.1 and 2.0 of my paper.tex (just an example, it can be named whatever you like) would be paper_V1-1.tex and paper_V2.tex respectively. I like to name my latexdiff '.tex' files as V{old#}--V{new#}-diff_paper.tex. It was a pain to write this format every time, so I programmed it so that the version and the name of the paper would be extracted automatically and all you need to provide is the old and the new file, and a few flags if I wanted.

As I said, I used to have trouble running latexdiff on my papers and having it crash because of tables, longtables, section titles, footnotes or long citations. So the default behavior is as follows:

• only pictures are surrounded by a blue marquee
• differences in the math are level 2 (detects changes within equations, but not minor changes)
• citations aren't marked for differences (boxes break the page width sometimes, so I disabled it)
• tables and longtables aren't marked for differences
• footnotes and sections aren't marked for differences

However, I made a few flags to help with the latexdiff options:

• --graphics-markup can be passed directly to latexdiff
• math-markup can be passed directly to latexdiff
• '-e', '--enable-citation-markup', '--enable-auto-mbox' can be used to revert the citations to being marked
• '-t', '--enable-tables' can be used to revert the tables to being marked

Until now, I've had only trouble with sections and footnotes, so I haven't put up flags to activate them again. If necessary, you can edit the main code to activate them again.

Running my_latexdiff.sh

Since I use git and I'd like my most recent version to stay with the simple name I chose first. In this example it would be paper.tex, but you can name it whatever and the program will take that name for the diff file too. Since I'm using this simple name, I need to pass the version number of the older file as a flag, and to rename the older version so it has the version in the filename. This is what I like to do, but technically you can use any combination of flags or filename.

If you use git, first take the file from a previous commit and rename it so it has a version number on it:

git show {SHA1}:./paper.tex > ./paper_V1-1.tex

Then I'd run my_latexdiff.sh as such:

./my_latexdiff.sh paper_V1-1.tex paper.tex --newversion="2" --compile --view --clean

--compile will run latexcompile.sh on the diff file, --view will open the file after finishing and --clean will remove the secondary files of the diff files.

--newversion="2" is a string, so it can be "2-5" or anything you'd like. If the old version also doesn't have the number on the filename you can set it with --oldversion. --oldversion defaults to 1 and --newversion defaults to 2.

Clean LaTeX secondary files

I work in directory trees hosting my manuscript in one directory and, let's say, the title page or the cover letter in other directories. This means that if I didn't clean the secondary files after compiling, lots of files I don't need are just wasting space in my project folder.

This is why I made recursive_clean_latex_secondary_files.sh. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, it finds all the files in my main directory recursively accessing sub-directories, and deletes all the secondary files. This one doesn't have any flags, but you can pass a directory name as an argument. For example:

./recursive_clean_latex_secondary_files.sh 1_manuscript

Working in sub-directories

I work in sub-directories to split work on my manuscript and my other tex files, like I said, and it looks kind of like this:

latex-paper/
├── 0_author-contribution/
│   ├── paper-author-contribution.pdf
│   └── paper-author-contribution.tex
├── 0_coverletter/
│   ├── paper-coverletter.pdf
│   └── paper-coverletter.tex
├── 0_manuscript_blind/
│   ├── paper_blind.pdf
│   └── paper_blind.tex
├── 0_references/
│   ├── paper-references.pdf
│   └── paper-references.tex
├── 0_titlepage/
│   ├── paper-titlepage.pdf
│   └── paper-titlepage.tex
├── 0_vitae/
│   ├── paper-vitae.pdf
│   └── paper-vitae.tex
├── 1_manuscript/
│   ├── paper.pdf
│   └── paper.tex
├── 2_revisions/
│   ├── V1_first_submit/
│   └── V2_major_revision/
├── 3_review-responses/
│   ├── reviewer-1_response.txt
│   ├── reviewer-2_response.txt
│   └── reviewer-3_response.txt
├── Z_tables/
│   ├── table1.csv
│   └── table2.csv
├── argparse.bash
├── latexcompile.sh
├── my_latexdiff.sh
└── recursive_clean_latex_secondary_files.sh

Because I leave my executable files in the root folder, and my programs use the filename passed as an argument to name the other files, I usually call them from the folder they are in, like this:

cd 1_manuscript
../latexcompile.sh paper.tex --clean --view
../my_latexdiff.sh paper_V1-1.tex paper.tex --newversion="2" --compile --view --clean

Manual latexdiff options

In my_latexdiff.sh, the default behavior is as follows:

latexdiff -t UNDERLINE --graphics-markup="new-only" --math-markup="coarse" --disable-citation-markup --exclude-textcmd="section" --exclude-textcmd="section\*" --exclude-textcmd="footnote" --config="PICTUREENV=(?:picture|DIFnomarkup|table|longtable)[\w\d*@]*" $OLDFILE $NEWFILE > $DIFFFILE

You can use the flags as explained above, but if you need more options, as a general rule:

--exclude-textcmd is used to avoid making diff checks to text commands like section or footnote, but you can add your own by editing the .sh file directly.

--config="PICTUREENV=(?:picture|DIFnomarkup|table|longtable)[\w\d*@]*" is currently avoiding pictures, tables, longtables, and latexdiff's DIFnomarkup environment. This will avoid marking any of the specified environments that use \begin{env_name} and \end{env_name}. To add more, inside the parenthesis where picture and table are, just write |{env_name} to add an environment. Just remember to replace {env_name} with the name of the environment.

--graphics-markup, --math-markup and --disable-citation-markup are just normal options for latexdiff, with the following effects as per the help section of latexdiff:

--graphics-markup=level   Change highlight style for graphics embedded with \includegraphics commands
                      Possible values for level:
                      none,off or 0: no highlighting for figures
                      new-only or 1: surround newly added or changed figures with a blue frame [Default]
                      both or 2:     highlight new figures with a blue frame and show deleted figures
                                at reduced scale, and crossed out with a red diagonal cross. Use configuration
                                variable SCALEDELGRAPHICS to set size of deleted figures.
                      Note that changes to the optional parameters will make the figure appear as changed
                      to latexdiff, and this figure will thus be highlighted.

--math-markup=level    Determine granularity of markup in displayed math environments:
                      Possible values for level are (both numerical and text labels are acceptable):
                      off or 0: suppress markup for math environments.  Deleted equations will not
                               appear in diff file. This mode can be used if all the other modes
                               cause invalid latex code.
                      whole or 1: Differencing on the level of whole equations. Even trivial changes
                               to equations cause the whole equation to be marked changed.  This
                               mode can be used if processing in coarse or fine mode results in
                               invalid latex code.
                      coarse or 2: Detect changes within equations marked up with a coarse
                               granularity; changes in equation type (e.g.displaymath to equation)
                               appear as a change to the complete equation. This mode is recommended
                               for situations where the content and order of some equations are still
                               being changed. [Default]
                      fine or 3: Detect small change in equations and mark up and fine granularity.
                               This mode is most suitable, if only minor changes to equations are
                               expected, e.g. correction of typos.

--disable-citation-markup
--disable-auto-mbox    Suppress citation markup and markup of other vulnerable commands in styles
                       using ulem (UNDERLINE,FONTSTRIKE, CULINECHBAR)
                       (the two options are identical and are simply aliases)

---

I hope these are all useful to you, thanks for reading!