Open Tech Strategies's Document Infrastructure

This is Open Tech Strategies' infrastructure for building our published documents from their source files. Most of the documents are written in LaTeX, though we sometimes use other formats too.

The expected audience is people who want to work with the source text of our published reports. If you have the source repository for a given report, and you have this infrastructure, you should be able to re-create the published report (usually a PDF). Please let us know if you have difficulty doing so. We always welcome suggestions for improving this infrastructure.

Installation

• Install the system software prerequisites.

  Make sure pdflatex and latexmk are installed on your system already.

• Set up the OTS_DOCTOOLS_DIR environment variable.

  Set the environment variable OTS_DOCTOOLS_DIR to point to the directory where you have this source tree checked out. For example, put something like this in your ~/.bashrc:

    OTS_DOCTOOLS_DIR=${HOME}/src/ots-doctools
    export OTS_DOCTOOLS_DIR

• Set up the TEXMFHOME environment variable.

  Set the TEXMFHOME variable so that that kpathsea can find latex/* in this directory. For example, put

    TEXMFHOME=${HOME}/texmf
    export TEXMFHOME

  in your ~/.bashrc, and make sure that ~/texmf/tex/latex/ots is a symlink to ${OTS_DOCTOOLS_DIR}/latex. (Because kpathsea sometimes behaves oddly, we also recommend mkdir ~/texmf/tex/latex/dummy so that kpathsea will follow the symlink properly.)

Usage

The top-level Makefile in your document's source tree -- remember, that's a different tree from this one -- should be a copy of the file ext-Makefile here. If you got the document tree from us, that will already be the case. Just run

  $ make foo.pdf

to build foo.pdf from foo.ltx. For draft PDFs, use make foo.draft.pdf.

Windows

Linux and OS X should generally do the right thing with these materials. We have not documented how to set this up on Windows because we haven't tried that setup. If you're on Windows, please let us know how it goes and how we can improve these materials.