Integrating OmniGraffle and Latexmk

Compiling LaTeX documents can be quite a hassle, because it’s an iterative process, and the dependancies are not really clear. There is one gem of a tool, however, that any regular LaTeXer should know: Latexmk.

Latexmk handles all the common TeX pipelines (DVI, PS, PDF…), detects most if not all the dependancies if your document is split into several source files, and will (re-)run LaTeX, BibTeX, etc. as needed, effectively reducing building most documents to this invocation:

$ latexmk

Very nice indeed, but what about figures created in an external editor like OmniGraffle? Going through OmniGraffle’s menus to export documents to PDF after each change quickly gets boring.

Exporting from OmniGraffle automatically

First of all, we need a way to convert a .graffle file to PDF automatically¹. My solution was a short Ruby wrapper around an AppleScript invocation, but I guess Automator would work as well. Just drop the script somewhere in your $PATH and make sure it’s executable. I didn’t pay much attention to making the invocation flexible, because I only use it in an automatic way, so both input and output file names have to be specified explicitely:

$ graffle2pdf figure.graffle figure.pdf

By the way, my script also includes the rule to use it with Make, just run graffle2pdf >> Makefile to append it:

.SUFFIXES: .graffle .pdf
.graffle.pdf:
        @echo Converting $< to PDF...
        @graffle2pdf $< $@

Adding a custom rule to Latexmk

Latexmk already has many rules to handle the many steps in compiling a LaTeX document, and it’s possible to specify more. Here’s the one to call graffle2pdf:

add_cus_dep( 'graffle', 'pdf', 0, 'graffle2pdf' );
sub graffle2pdf {
   system("graffle2pdf $_[0].graffle $_[0].pdf");
}

Append these lines to your ~/.latexmkrc file, and you’re done. The first line indicates to Latexmk that it can obtain a .pdf file from a .graffle one by calling the Perl procedure below. In this case it invokes the graffle2pdf script, but since this is Perl, it could do everything in place. Also, since this is Perl, the least I had to deal with it, the better :-)

For the curious, there are many more additional rules in the example config file on CTAN.

Basic Latexmk configuration

My LaTeX pipeline of choice is PDFLaTeX; here are a few more options in ~/.latexmkrc that I found useful:

$pdf_mode = 1;
$pdflatex = 'pdflatex -8bit -etex -file-line-error -halt-on-error -synctex=1 %O %S';
$pdf_previewer = 'open %S';
$pdf_update_method = 0;
$clean_ext = "synctex.gz";

@default_files = ('main.tex');

From top to bottom, these tell Latexmk:

• to generate PDF via pdflatex, with some options to get better command-line behavior and to activate SyncTeX for jumping between editor and previewer (PDFsync has some strange interactions with style files we use);
• to open the generated PDF file the Mac way (I’m using Skim, for SyncTeX support);
• to include the SyncTeX file in the garbage when cleaning (latexmk -C).

The last line specifies that the document to compile is often named main.tex, so I can just type latexmk to build without thinking². This convention can be overridden on a per-document basis by setting the correct value for @default_files in a .latexmkrc or latexmkrc file besides the LaTeX sources.

Happy LaTeXing!