Using a Makefile to make LaTeX more usable...

I write papers in LaTeX when I can (usually when writing by myself or with geeks). I like the simplicity of LaTeX and the fact that you can do various complicated things fairly easy. However, I can understand how it seems less-than-usable to most people. For example, for a paper with a bibliography, figures and references you have to type:

latex file.tex bibtex file latex file.tex latex file.tex

That's less-than-ideal but is necessary in LaTeX to match all the references and citations.

However, I recently wrote a large-ish grant proposal with a bunch of CS geeks who used LaTeX for the proposal... however they also used CVS and Makefiles to get the job done even more efficiently!

So, here is a simple Makefile that you can use that makes using LaTeX somewhat easier. To use this, simply copy the file to the directory with your .tex and .bib files (LaTeX and BiBTeX files respectively). Change the name of this file to Makefile and edit the file so that all occurances of the string latex-file are changed to whatever the prefix of your LaTeX file is (I assume that your .bib file has the same prefix). I usually just use make pdf which builds a nice pdf and make clean which deletes all the non-essential auxillary files and such.