README.md

latexmk for Latexjs (mirror)

To be a complete LaTeX toolchain we need something like latexmk to be able to perform the correct number of executions of pdflatex and bibtex, and unfortunately there isn't a good native (and hence Emscripten-able) or Javascript solution for this. As a stopgap, we currently use latexmk and rely on a system Perl interpreter for macOS/Linux (a reasonably safe bet) and use pp to compile a standalone Windows binary of latexmk for Windows (where we can't guarantee at all that a perl interpreter will be kicking around).

This repository stores the current version of latexmk that we use in Latexjs and the compiled Windows binary version.

Bumping to a new version of latexmk

On Windows:

1. Install Strawberry Perl
2. Following these instructions first install the cpanm tool:

cpan App::cpanminus

3. Then use this to install pp:

cpanm pp

With this done, we can now build a binary of latexmk:

1. Download the latest version of latexmk
2. Run

pp -M FindBin -o latexmk.exe latexmk.pl

To build a Windows binary. Note that we manually include FindBin as we use this in our custom latexmk config perl script.

3. Commit and push the changes
4. Rebuild latexjs/latexjs to include the new version in an update of Latexjs.