This is Rubber. Rubber is a building system for LaTeX documents. It is based on a routine that runs just as many compilations as necessary and runs companion programs like BibTeX and Makeindex when needed. The module system provides a great flexibility that virtually allows support for any package with no user intervention, as well as pre- and post-processing of the document. A good number of standard packages are supported, including graphics/graphicx with automatic conversion between various graphics formats and Metapost compilation. The associated tool "rubber-info" extracts information, such as dependency relations or post-compilation diagnostics. * Installation Running Rubber just requires Python version 2.6 or newer. Of course it won't be of much use without a working LaTeX environment (Rubber is known to work on TeXLive and VTeX on various flavors of Unix including Darwin and Cygwin, any feedback is welcome about other systems). For compilation, you will need the Python Distutils, which are usually included in development packages (in Debian, this is the python-dev package). To build the documentation, you need texinfo (Debian package: texinfo). To compile and install Rubber, just follow the usual procedure: # python2 setup.py --help # python2 setup.py install # python2 setup.py clean --all Some useful options to setup.py include: Disabling info docs: # python2 setup.py build --info=False install and similar for --html, --man, --pdf. Changing the installation path for manpages: # python2 setup.py install --mandir=/path/to/man/pages Installing to a staging directory instead of the root/prefix: # python2 setup.py install --root=/staging/directory Note that if you need build and install to be two different steps (for example when building packages for distribution purposes), Python's distutils will forget about any 'build' options, and re-build with default options during the 'install' stage. This is worrysome if you'd like not to build some of the documentation. It is then best to make options permanent by putting them info a setup.cfg file. For example: [build] man = 1 html = 0 pdf = 0 info = 0 txt = 0 [install] prefix = /usr Finally, invoke # python2 setup.py build # python2 setup.py install --root=/staging/directory * Usage As civility requires, saying `rubber --help' and `rubber-info --help' provides a short description of the command line's syntax. The included manual pages (available in English and French) and Texinfo documentation contain more precise usage information. * Author Rubber was originally written by Emmanuel Beffara <emmanuel@beffara.org>. It is currently maintained by Sebastian Kapfer <sebastian.kapfer@fau.de>. Its homepage can be found at https://launchpad.net/rubber. Thanks to all those who provided testing, comments and suggestions, and re-thanks to those who wrote patches and bugfixes. Any kind of feedback is appreciated, in order to make this program as useful, robust and powerful as possible.