[pdftex] (Highly) local pdftex configuration?

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 12:13:35AM +0100, Hartmut Henkel wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to set up a build for a pdflatex project where I use rubber
> > [1], which doesn't seem to allow me to pass command-line switches to
> > the underlying program (in my case, pdflatex). I'd like to run
> > pdflatex with --shell-escape, but I haven't been able to find any nice
> > way of doing it (save running pdflatex once *before* I run rubber, for
> > example). I've tried alias pdflatex="pdflatex --shell- escape", to no
> > avail.
> >
> > I don't really want to add it to the global texmf.cnf, but in a local
> > one -- local to the build directory -- I wouldn't mind adding
> > "shell_escape = t". Can I do it this locally, preferably using shell
> > variables or the like in the Makefile or something?
> >
> > [1] http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber/
> 
> this shell function e. g. gives the pdflatex help:
> 
> function pdflatex () { /usr/local/texlive/2007/bin/x86_64-linux/pdflatex --help $*; }
> 
> so it should work also with --shell-escape. The full path is there as it
> seems to block infinite self-recursion; maybe this can be done also by
> some quoting trick?

function pdflatex() { `type -P pdflatex` --help "$@"; }

Functions or aliases work inside the shell, I don't know rubber.
But why not using a simple shell script?

pdflatex.shell-escape:

  #!/bin/sh
  pdflatex --shell-escape "$@"

Then pdflatex.shell-escape can be used without command line switch.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>
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