A Makefile for Developing Containerized LaTeX Technical Documents
This work addresses reproducibility and automation issues for researchers and authors creating technical documents with LaTeX, but it is incremental as it builds on existing containerization and Makefile practices.
The authors tackled the problem of automating and ensuring reproducibility in containerized LaTeX technical document development by proposing a Makefile that integrates code execution for generating variables, tables, and figures with LaTeX compilation, resulting in an open-source template demonstrated in their paper.
We propose a Makefile for developing containerized $\LaTeX$ technical documents. The Makefile allows the author to execute the code that generates variables, tables and figures (results), which are then used during the $\LaTeX$ compilation, to produce either the draft (fast) or full (slow) version of the document. We also present various utilities that aid in automating the results generation and improve the reproducibility of the document. We release an open source repository of a template that uses the Makefile and demonstrate its use by developing this paper.