6

I've recently discovered MiKTeX's texify tool, which appears to run LaTeX/BibTeX repeatedly until the output has stabilised. Is it safe to rely completely on this tool, or are there circumstances where one needs to run it more than once?

Edit: Is there a list of circumstances under which it is safe/unsafe to use texify?

(If not, perhaps a 'community wiki' is appropriate here, although I don't really understand what it is?)

Svend Tveskæg
  • 31,033
Mohan
  • 15,906
  • 1
    related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/35832/what-are-the-situations-where-you-have-to-compile-a-document-more-than-once – cmhughes Oct 17 '12 at 16:30
  • Another case: if one item in your bibliography cross-refers to another item in your bibliography, you need to run texify twice. – Mohan Oct 18 '12 at 20:59

2 Answers2

6

It depends on the code and the packages. For example pgf does not generate a rerun warning, if remember picture is used, whereas zref-savepos uses LaTeX's internal reference system that generates a warning, if the label has changed.

There is package rerunfilecheck, that tracks auxiliary files based on MD5 checksums and print rerun warnings, if the contents of the auxiliary files has changed.

But of course, there are documents that never stabilize (the documentation of varioref mentions a case). Also the opposite is also true, there are documents with unnecessary rerun warnings.

Heiko Oberdiek
  • 271,626
  • Is there any easy way to tell whether something in a particular document is going to be safe to texify? – Mohan Oct 17 '12 at 16:27
  • @Mohan: You should clarify your question by adding this, but I do not know any such document. – Speravir Oct 17 '12 at 16:35
2

I use texify regularly. I’ve changed the latex calls in my TeX editor, and it works fine. Note, that the command line options have to be changed slightly:

pdflatex --interaction=batchmode => texify --pdf --batch
pdflatex --interaction=nonstopmode => texify --pdf --tex-option="--interaction=nonstopmode"
pdflatex --synctex=1 => texify --pdf --tex-option="--synctex=1"
pdflatex --enable-write18 => texify --pdf --tex-option="--enable-write18"

But it does not work together with biblatex and especially biber, at least the last time I needed it. And this is a point, where arara or latexmk get into serious consideration.

I’ve never looked into it, but the source code should reveal, how texify works, see here: http://miktex.org/sources

Speravir
  • 19,491
  • 'it works fine': like you I know (empirically) that it's quite reliable; what I'm worried about is the cases where it fails. biblatex/biber are useful to know about. – Mohan Oct 17 '12 at 16:26
  • Heiko wrote about pgf, what is used by tikz. I’ve forgotten this, but I observed exactly, what he says regarding “remember picture”. – Speravir Oct 17 '12 at 16:33