.aux
file, or the
.idx
file, respectively) has changed, and so on.
Latexmk is a fine
solution (and was used in generating printable versions of these
FAQs for some time); it has recently been upgraded and has
many bells and whistles that allow it to operate as if it were a poor
man’s WYSIWYG system.
A recent strong contender is arara, written in
Java. It is (the documentation says) based on “rules”
and “directives”; its aim is to determine what to do from explicit
instructions in the document’s source code, rather than secondary
sources such as log file analysis. Arara is relatively new
on CTAN, and comes with recommendations from many of the great and
good of the LaTeX world.
Newer still is the Python script try, which has a similar
structure to arara — it, too, reads instructions in the
document source.
Apparently along the same lines, is AutoLaTeX. The README
of the distribution is actual a Unix-type man-page output, and shows
great attention to the details of the document production process.
The (Ruby) script mk (also, apparently, known as
latex_maker) works well with another of the author’s
scripts script called vpp (View and Print
PostScript/PDF).
Windows users of the MiKTeX system may use that system’s
texify application. Texify deals with basic
LaTeX features, including generating a bibliography and an index;
it makes no claim to deal with other things (such as multiple
bibliographies or indexes, or lists of terminology, etc.), which
AutoLaTeX can be configured to process.
The texinfo system comes with a similar
utility called texi2dvi, which is capable of “converting”
either LaTeX or texinfo files into DVI (or into
PDF, using PDFTeX).
A later contribution is the bundle latexmake, which
offers a set of make rules that invoke texi2dvi
as necessary.
The curious may examine the rules employed to run the present
FAQ through LaTeX: we don’t present them as a complete
solution, but some of the tricks employed are surely re-usable.
This answer last edited: 2013-05-13
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=make