pydflatex file.tex

Some useful options:

• -o: open the pdf in a pdf viewer
• -k: keep compiling on error
• -w: show the box warnings

pydflatex is a wrapper around pdflatex which produces a short, readable, coloured output.

The most interesting features are:

• suppressing the logorrhoeic output of LaTeX and giving a coloured, short summary of the warnings and errors instead.
• opening the pdf in your editor of choice

Pydflatex is only a shell around the pdflatex, but you can use it along with scons in order to compile large documents. In order to do this, create a Sconstruct file which contains this code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
env = Environment(ENV=os.environ)
env['PDFLATEX'] = 'pydflatex'
env['PDFLATEXFLAGS'] = '-wk'
pdf = env.PDF(target='main.pdf', source='main.tex')
env.Precious(pdf)

SCons will now use pydflatex to compile your document. This will automatically take care of the index, bibliography, recompiling if an included file is modified, etc.

It is easy to write a simple python script that calls the typesetter and does precisely what you need in your project. One way to achieve that would be:

from pydflatex import Typesetter
t = Typesetter(texfilename)
t.typeset_file()

• Python v.2.6 (because of the new string formatting)
• termstyle (optional but strongly advised): to display results in colour