node-latexmk

This is very much still a work in progress

A wrapper for latexmk in nodejs. Inspired by node-latex.

The only scope I will personally be using this for, at least at the moment, is for generating PDFs. If this ends up being useful to anyone else and you want to make changes, pull requests are very welcome.

Requirements

You need to have LaTeX installed on your system. I believe latexmk is part of TeX Live. Installation instructions are on the LaTeX website.

If you're on a Mac with Homebrew you can install using

brew cask install mactex

It's technically possible to do a lightweight installation using basictex, but that requires a lot of manually installing packages, which is too much for me to go into here.

Installation

npm install node-latexmk

Usage

const latex = require('node-latexmk')

const input = 'pathto/input.tex'
const output = 'pathto/output.pdf'

latex(input, output, [options], (err) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err)
  } else {
    // do something now the pdf has been generated
  }
})

Parameter	Type	Description
input	string	A full path to your input .tex file
output	string	A full path to where you want your generated pdf to go (again, this only works with PDFs for now)
options (optional)	object	An object that can be used to set various options
callback	function	A callback that contains an error if it exists, null if all is okay

Options

Please note, if an option with a default hasn't been set, the defaults will automatically be added to the options object.

Option	Type	Default	Description
passes	number	1	How many times latexmk should run (use 2 or more for pythontex)
args	array<string>	['-pdf', '-g', '-f', '-interaction=nonstopmode']	The arguments that will be sent by default. Any arguments passed in the options object will be considered as additional to these four, unless noargs is set to true
noargs	boolean	false	Set this to true if you want to remove the arguments above and set them all yourself
dependencies	array<string>	-	An array of paths to files you would like copied in addition to the tex file, for example a JSON object of options or a template file.
dependencyRenames	Object<string, string>	-	A dictionary that will allow the dependency files to be renamed upon copy. Useful if you need to dynamically generate them with random filenames but your .tex file expects something with a certain name
ignoreNoTex	boolean	false	node-latexmk will return an error if your input file does not end in .tex. Set this to true to ignore that behaviour

Troubleshooting

pythontex doesn't run

If your code includes pythontex, you need at least 2 passes to generate a valid PDF. See above for how to add this to the options object.

If that still doesn't work, you may need to include the following in your .latexmkrc file:

add_cus_dep(’pytxcode’, ’tex’, 0, ’pythontex’);
sub pythontex { return system("pythontex \"$_[0]\""); }