Generating pdf-latex with python script

Question

I\'m a college guy, and in my college, to present any kind of homework, it has to have a standard coverpage (with the college logo, course name, professor\'s name, my name a

Answer 1

You can start by defining the template tex file as a string:

content = r'''\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
...
\textbf{\huge %(school)s \\}
\vspace{1cm}
\textbf{\Large %(title)s \\}
...
\end{document}
'''

Next, use argparse to accept values for the course, title, name and school:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-c', '--course')
parser.add_argument('-t', '--title')
parser.add_argument('-n', '--name',) 
parser.add_argument('-s', '--school', default='My U')

A bit of string formatting is all it takes to stick the args into content:

args = parser.parse_args()
content%args.__dict__

After writing the content out to a file, cover.tex,

with open('cover.tex','w') as f:
    f.write(content%args.__dict__)

you could use subprocess to call pdflatex cover.tex.

proc = subprocess.Popen(['pdflatex', 'cover.tex'])
proc.communicate()

You could add an lpr command here too to add printing to the workflow.

Remove unneeded files:

os.unlink('cover.tex')
os.unlink('cover.log')

The script could then be called like this:

make_cover.py -c "Hardest Class Ever" -t "Theoretical Theory" -n Me

---

Putting it all together,

import argparse
import os
import subprocess

content = r'''\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
... P \& B 
\textbf{\huge %(school)s \\}
\vspace{1cm}
\textbf{\Large %(title)s \\}
...
\end{document}
'''

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-c', '--course')
parser.add_argument('-t', '--title')
parser.add_argument('-n', '--name',) 
parser.add_argument('-s', '--school', default='My U')

args = parser.parse_args()

with open('cover.tex','w') as f:
    f.write(content%args.__dict__)

cmd = ['pdflatex', '-interaction', 'nonstopmode', 'cover.tex']
proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd)
proc.communicate()

retcode = proc.returncode
if not retcode == 0:
    os.unlink('cover.pdf')
    raise ValueError('Error {} executing command: {}'.format(retcode, ' '.join(cmd))) 

os.unlink('cover.tex')
os.unlink('cover.log')