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 and bla bla bla).

So, I have a .tex document, which generate my standard coverpages pdfs. It goes something like:

...
\begin{document}
%% College logo
\vspace{5cm}
\begin{center}
\textbf{\huge "School and Program Name" \\}
\vspace{1cm}
\textbf{\Large "Homework Title" \\}
\vspace{1cm}
\textbf{\Large "Course Name" \\}
\end{center}
\vspace{2.5cm}
\begin{flushright}
{\large "My name" }
\end{flushright}
...

So, I was wondering if there's a way to make a Python script that asks me for the title of my homework, the course name and the rest of the strings and use them to generate the coverpage. After that, it should compile the .tex and generate the pdf with the information given.

Any opinions, advice, snippet, library, is accepted.

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')