Writing proper Makefiles for building LaTeX documents is a pain, since the steps for creating the final documents depend on the LaTeX features that are used, e.g., BibTeX, makeindex, etc. The excellent “latexmk” tool drastically simplifies Makefiles for building LaTeX documents. In this article I present a Makefile template, that can be used for building papers which use the file layout that has been proposed in previous articles.

In this first article of my collaborative paper authoring series I’m proposing a directory layout for storing a single paper in a subversion repository. While using a version control system is essential in a multi-user environment, storing your papers in a subversion repository makes also sense if you are the only author. The general benefits of version control, such as archiving and restoring of different versions for all files, documentation of changes and painless synchronization of data between multiple computers will pay off quickly, even in a single user environment.

Writing scientific papers for journals and conferences is one of the most important tasks in academic research. Many papers are co-authored by multiple authors, frequently also by authors that are not even member of the same institution. Typically, a paper goes through numerous states of editing during the writing process, requiring that changes to the document [...]