Can I pass LaTeX commands to latexmk instead of a filename?

Question

This is a follow-up to How can I automate the workflow for producing multiple versions of a document?

Here is toy example of my problem. I want to automate the generation of two slightly different versions of a document. Each one should be generated using latexmk. In one version, no class option should be used:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
foo
\end{document}

In the other, some class option should be used, e.g.:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\begin{document}
foo
\end{document}

Of course, I could

1. compile once without the class option,
2. edit my .tex file and manually add the class option,
3. compile a second time,

but this approach lacks automation. Alternatively, I could use two files:

% withoutoption.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
foo
\end{document}

and

% withoption.tex
\PassOptionsToClass{twocolumn}{article}
\input{withoutoption.tex}

but, ideally, I'd like to only have one file to maintain, and pass class options from outside the .tex file (in a makefile). From Martin Scharrer's answer, I know I can pass a class option without having to edit the file, like so:

pdflatex "\PassOptionsToClass{twocolumn}{article}\input{foo}"

I'd like to use latexmk instead of pdflatex, though, and I can't figure out how the approach above would translate to latexmk. I must admit I'm not very familiar with the latexmk syntax, but I've scanned the documentation, and it appears latexmk can only accept a filename, not an argument of the form

"\PassOptionsToClass{twocolumn}{article}\input{foo}"

Did I miss something? Can latexmk be used in this fashion?

Answer 1

You could use the -latex or -pdflatex options. I'll use pdflatex for the examples but it should work with latex as well.

latexmk -pdf article

will look for article.tex, invoke the command associated with the pdflatex option which by default is

"pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 %S %O"

where %S is replaced by the filename and %O by the options.

So to produce the twocolumn version you could run

latexmk -pdf -pdflatex='pdflatex %O -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 "\PassOptionsToClass{twocolumn}{article}\input{%S}"' article

and you would find the twocolumns version in article.pdf. The nice thing is that you can create an alias for latexmk -pdf -pdflatex='pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 "\PassOptionsToClass{twocolumn}{article}\input{%S}" %O' and run it on different tex files to obtain the twocolumn version of each.

I moved %O before the other options because this seems to enable using -jobname=name as an option of latexmk (see comments).

Now this is not enough because if you then re run latexmk -pdf article without making changes to article.tex, latexmk would fail to recognise the options have changed and will not recompile the document. So to force that you can add the -g option.