On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:41:25 +0100, Stefano Crocco  
<stefano.crocco / alice.it> wrote:

> Does anyone know whether there's a rake task to build latex files,  
> including taking care of whether latex should be run one or more times?  
> I searched google, this mailing list, rubyforge and RAA, but found  
> nothing.

As far as I know there is no such rake task. Almost all people using LaTeX  
use an environment that takes care of this (AucTeX for example), launch  
the programs manually or use Makefiles for it

> If  nobody has already written one, I can do it myself, but I wanted to  
> be sure before attempting it.

Let me suggest that you do not write such a task from scratch but starting  
with a proven Makefile. While the implementation of the tasks is simple,  
the dependencies that need to be taken into account are not. Two Makefiles  
you may wish to look at:

http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/u/mairas/UltimateLatexMakefile/
http://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/

And please consider taking a look at AucTeX. In my humble opinion it is  
the best available environment to write LaTeX and it is available for  
every operating system that has GNU Emacs or XEmacs and a LaTeX  
implementation (i.e. on virtually every operating system currently in use).

http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/

Even though I use vim most of the time I prefer writing LaTeX with Emacs  
and AucTeX.

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt
-- 
Blog: http://penpen.goodaddress.eu/
PGP key (id 6CC6574F): http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net/
Jabber - http://www.jabber.org/ - contact information on request