After using (and writting) several ugly Makefiles for compiling LaTeX, I discovered rubber (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber/ http://www.pps.jussi

After using (and writting) several ugly Makefiles for compiling LaTeX, I discovered rubber (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber/ http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber/) and never looked back. It is packaged at least in the standard Ubuntu and Fedora repos. I use the following Makefile wrapper around it: DOC = memoria all: rubber --pdf $(DOC) clean: rubber --pdf --clean $(DOC) .PHONY: all clean It handles biblography, knows how many times recompile and discovers dependencies.