After I read an article on latex-community.org I got intrigued: this sounded like a really comfortable way to automate my compiling process! So today I downloaded, installed and used Paolo Cereda‘s arara for the first time — and immediately fell in love with it.
So now I’d like to tell you how I installed it on my linux machine, added an entry to my kile editor and how it works once you’ve set it up.
This file must be executable, so I run
That’s it. Since I am a dedicated kile user I created a menu entry for
The first five lines
tell
With some effort that took less than an hour I made my life a lot easier!
Thanks very much to Paolo for this awesome software!
Installation
Since I am working with OpenSUSE as OS I tell you, what I did to get it working there. The first step is to downloadarara.jar
. Then I created the directory /opt/arara/
and placed the file in there. Now I created a bash script in the same directory named arara
containing the following two lines:
#!/bin/bash
java -jar "$(dirname "$0")/arara.jar" $*
java -jar "$(dirname "$0")/arara.jar" $*
chmod 777 arara
on the command line. (I changed these rights to more restricted ones later. I was eager to start!) Next thing to do was making it accessable from everywhere. For this I added the following lines to the .profile
file in my home directory:
# arara
PATH=/opt/arara:$PATH; export PATH
PATH=/opt/arara:$PATH; export PATH
arara
next. Simply go to Einstellungen > Kile einrichten > Werkzeuge > Erstellen
and add an entry arara
with options '--verbose %S'
. Now we’re good to go. Sorry for the menu entries being in German. The English ones must be something like Settings > Setup Kile > Tools > Built
.
Setting it up
Next thing you need are rules forarara
. Otherwise it won’t do anything. But to get started you don’t need to dig too deep into it. I created the subdirectory /opt/arara/rules/plain/
. This directory now should contain the rules which are files with the extension yaml
. Paolo Cereda has a bunch of them ready to use.
So for testing purposes I copied them into the directory and I was ready for testing. The names of the yaml
files now are the rules for arara
.
Creating these rules on your own isn’t very difficult, though. The documentation explains several examples step by step. Actually I created own rules first before I realized there were ready ones.
Let the music begin: run arara
For testing purposes I created a filetest.tex
containg these lines:
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: makeindex: { style: test.ist }
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{makeidx}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.ist}
heading_prefix "{\\bfseries "
heading_suffix "\\hfil}\\nopagebreak\n"
headings_flag 1
delim_0 "\\dotfill "
delim_1 "\\dotfill "
delim_2 "\\dotfill "
delim_r "\\textendash"
suffix_2p "\\nohyperpage{\\,f.}"
suffix_3p "\\nohyperpage{\\,ff.}"
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\makeindex
\begin{document}
A citation\cite{companion} and an index entry\index{bla} and some arbitrary text.
\printbibliography
\printindex
\end{document}
% arara: makeindex: { style: test.ist }
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{makeidx}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.ist}
heading_prefix "{\\bfseries "
heading_suffix "\\hfil}\\nopagebreak\n"
headings_flag 1
delim_0 "\\dotfill "
delim_1 "\\dotfill "
delim_2 "\\dotfill "
delim_r "\\textendash"
suffix_2p "\\nohyperpage{\\,f.}"
suffix_3p "\\nohyperpage{\\,ff.}"
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\makeindex
\begin{document}
A citation\cite{companion} and an index entry\index{bla} and some arbitrary text.
\printbibliography
\printindex
\end{document}
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: makeindex: { style: test.ist }
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: makeindex: { style: test.ist }
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
arara
to run pdflatex
, then makeindex
with a custom style file, then biber
for the bibliography and pdflatex
twice more. Hit the arara
button in kile and voila: everythings ready!

Wow, that’s a nice summary. Thank’s for the effort!
Thanks! You’re welcome 🙂
I have posted this before arara v3.0 made it to CTAN. Now that it is part of TeX Live and has an installer installation is easier if even necessary, of course.