Journal home page
General information
Submit an item
Download style files
Copyright
Contact us
logo for The PracTeX Journal TUG logo

Continuous Integration in LaTeX

Marco Antonio Gomez-Martin and Pedro Pablo Gomez-Martin

Abstract

English

Have you ever co-written a paper using LaTeX together with some version control system such as SVN? Have you ever updated your local copy and the compilation has become broken due to a previous bad commit? Continuous integration avoids this problem using an auxiliary server that constantly checks the sanity of the repository, compiling the LaTeX documents for each commit and reporting possible problems. This paper describes how to configure this environment. The configuration effort is detailed but has to be done only once. Once in place, it provides other secondary advantages apart from the compilation tests: all authors can be automatically informed by e-mail when a new version is committed, and the current .pdf version can be made available to third parties on the Web.

Spanish

¿Has colaborado alguna vez en la escritura de un artículo utilizando LaTeX junto con algún sistema de control de versiones como SVN? ¿Has actualizado alguna vez tu copia local y ha dejado de ser compilable por culpa de un commit previo incorrecto? La integración contínua evita este problema utilizando un servidor auxiliar que comprueba constantemente la corrección de la copia oficial del repositorio, compilando los documentos LaTeX resultantes de cada commit y notificando posibles problemas. El presente artículo describe cómo configurar este entorno de trabajo. Si bien el esfuerzo de configuración inicial es innegable, proporciona la ventaja de comprobación automática de compilación así como otras ventajas adicionales: todos los autores pueden ser informados automáticamente por correo electrónico cuando se envía una nueva versión al servidor, y además la versión actual del fichero .pdf se puede hacer accesible via Web a terceras personas.

Pedro Pablo and Marco Antonio Gómez-Martín received their MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science in 2000 and 2008 from the University Complutense of Madrid. They have taught at the same university in the Master of Videogame Programming department since it first began in 2004. Their research involves the Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering aspects of the development of games. This includes educational games, where they search for new methods to improve the way students learn, and strive to keep development costs under control. For their prototypes they use Continuous Integration as a development tool to ensure the quality of the code base. They use LaTeX for nearly all of their documentation, including papers, assignments, exams, and manuals.

You can contact them by sending emails to or


Page generated June 9, 2010 ; TUG home page; join TUG/renew membership; webmaster; facebook; x; mastodon.