[Axiom-developer] Re: pdf makefile

[Tim Daly]

> > Axiom book which properly includes the graphics on the front page.
> > I'll see what I can steal from the makefile to add to axiom's makefile.
> 
> I tried it on a linux box and got no thumbnails, while the same on a sparc
> solaris got nice tumbnails etc also. This might be a version problem of
> the ghostscript used, the solaris runs ggv (gnome ghostview) as interface,
> you might see the uncommented lines where tumbnails etc are craeted, but
> on my solaris box these programs where not found.

Both the .ps and the .pdf files came out with the correctly embedded
graphics on Linux RH9.

> 
> > Since the book.tex file does not use bibtex entries the make stops
> > part way thru. I'll have to fix this.
> 
> This makefile was just a quick hack of a colleague of mine for TeXing his
> PhD thesis, so its quite stupid and assumed that a makeindex and / or a
> bibtex is used, of course this has to be changed. My point was just to
> deliver the options for dvips and ps2pdf so that pdf files look good on
> screen too.

Yeah, the options are useful. I'll look at setting this up.

> 
> By the way, is it possible to pass an argumat to a makefile, like the
> filename, or needs every tex document its own makefile then? 

There is an axiom command 'document' that gets built which knows about
pamphlet files and creates .dvi files. I'm going to hack that command
so you can request the target file format (dvi, ps, pdf). You should
be able to use it by doing:

export PATH=$AXIOM/bin:$PATH
document foo                    <=== note: note foo.pamphlet, just foo

currently 'document' extracts the .tex and creates a .dvi file.

I really should figure out how to transfer this information from the
configure script and make it part of the configuration. Plus configure
should check that the various pdf/ps/bibtex commands exist and work. 

> filename, or needs every tex document its own makefile then? In this cae
> it might be useful (and nice to look at for others) to create a bibtex
> database, which could be used by all AXIOM TeX files. Such a bibtex
> database could be made public over the web and might be a good source for
> looking for AXIOM usage and or related technical stuff.

Actually, there is an axiom.bib.pamphlet file that contains a huge amount
of bib references. I just haven't posted it yet. I'll add it to the TODO
list. I ripped out the bibtex step when I posted the book because I wanted
the book to be as close to a standalone file as I could get (module the
graphics). 

I'm working on a second book about fundamental math concepts (like
polynomial gcd) which is using the bibtex step so I'll need it 
eventually. The book is intended for beginning Axiom computer algebra
users and is based on D.E. Littlewood's "The Skeleton Keys of Mathematics".

Tim