IIRC entirely because I didn't use emacs to edit the figures, I was using xfig and later some other figure drawing program I can't remember the name of. If I w

IIRC entirely because I didn't use emacs to edit the figures, I was using xfig and later some other figure drawing program I can't remember the name of. If I were just using a save hook (or flymake-mode, which I later used for similar things), when I edited a figure emacs wouldn't know about it so I'd have to either manually run the build or go to emacs and force a file write.