SpiX 🦜 Yet another TeX compilation tool: simple, human readable, no option, no magic

SpiX is yet another compilation tool for .tex files. It aims at being simple and human readable. Every piece of configuration is written in the .tex file itself, in a clear format (a list of console commands).

Why SpiX?

With SpiX, the compilation process of a .tex file (Is it compiled using latex? pdflatex? xelatex? lualatex? Should I process its bibliography? with bibtex or biber? Is there an index?) is written in the .tex file itself, in a human-readable format (a shell script). That way:

• when you want to compile two years later, you don't have to guess the compilation process;
• you can send the .tex file to someone, and that's it: no need to send detailed instructions or a Makefile along with it (everything is in the .tex file);
• the compilation process is human readable: it can be understood by anyone who is able to read a very basic shell script. In particular, one can read it even if she does not know SpiX.

The .tex file

Write the compilation process of your .tex file as a shell script, before the preamble, as lines starting with %$:

% Compile this file twice with lualatex.
%$ lualatex foo.tex
%$ lualatex foo.tex

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, world!
\end{document}

You can also replace the file name with $texname. That way, you don't have to worry about the file name when writing your commands.

% Compile this file twice with lualatex.
%$ lualatex $texname
%$ lualatex $texname

Compilation

To compile the .tex file, run SpiX:

spix foo.tex

Spix will parse the .tex file, looking for shell snippets (lines before the preamble starting with %$), and run them.

That's all!

Documentation

The complete documentation is available on readthedocs.

To compile it from source, download and run:

cd doc && make html

What's new?

See changelog.

Download and install

• The preferred way to get SpiX working is by using your distribution package manager. With Debian (and Ubuntu, and surely other distributions that inherit from Debian), it is in package texlive-extra-utils (since version 2020.20210202-3)::

  sudo apt install texlive-extra-utils

• Otherwise, you can install SpiX using pip:

  python3 -m pip install spix

• Other installation methods can be found in the documentation.

License

Copyright 2020-2025 Louis Paternault

SpiX is licensed under the Gnu GPL 3 license, or any later version.