Building pdf on CI

[153957]

Today I came across this repo in which someone installs a newer version of TeX Live on Travis (this takes only ± 3 minutes). This is the 2012 version of TeX Live.

We could use this to test the compilation of the .tex files, see #14.

[153957]

And if we choose not to do this we should add sudo: false to the .travis.yml files to enable container based builds.

[153957]

See 'working' example in the ci-tex branch.. This does take several more minutes (9 instead of 2) to run. And not every demo works, I skipped; the demo that required SciPy, the Matplotlib plot, and the Polar axis plots. The Polar plots use a coordinate system to position the xlabel which is apparently unknown to the TikZ/PGFPlots in TeXLive 2012.

So.. is it worth the hassle? at least you will know if the pdf can compile. I only found out about the bug fixed with aad966be9ef1c3ed8982a2cb0f2390bb8726556d because I manually compiled the entire demo, the making of the tex files worked fine. However, that was not really an artist bug, but a LaTeX bug.

[153957]

Note; do not merge the ci-tex branch, it is a bit messy due to testing things, and the demo is no longer complete.

[davidfokkema]

Do you know of any PPA's with TeXLive 2015 (or 2014?). 2012 is a bit old. If we do this, we should decide which versions of TeXLive to support. Suppose we decide to support the current and previous versions, then we should test for TeXLive 2015 and TeXLive 2014. Is that feasible?

[153957]

I do not, I don't think there is any which will work on Travis. So supporting TeXLive on Travis remains unlikely.

[davidfokkema]

Pity. Is it possible to upload stuff to Travis? Or ssh into an environment? Maybe we can install TeXLive (both versions) manually and tar.gz the whole tree for unpacking during builds.

[davidfokkema]

Is this something we can use? https://github.com/thomasjo/travis-texlive. Not nice, but it works, I guess. Or create a custom package. Lots of work.

[153957]

Yea, that might be difficult. Travis also has some caching mechanism allowing you to cache some packages that are used for each build, Im not certain about the specifics, but that might be useful if we use our own built versions.

[153957]

See: https://github.com/HiSPARC/infopakket/pull/43/ https://github.com/HiSPARC/routenet/pull/6/ https://github.com/HiSPARC/logo/pull/4/

[153957]

Or maybe easier using Tectonic: https://malramsay.com/post/compiling_latex_on_travis/

[davidfokkema]

Looks interesting!

[153957]

Indeed, it should automatically install the packages required for the document you throw at it, so no worrying about configuring the install and it should keep the installation relatively small.

[davidfokkema]

Yes, the only gripe I have so far is that it doesn’t build on lualatex, de official successor of pdflatex. I have a large TikZ figure which both pdflatex and xelatex won’t compile because of memory problems, while lualatex just takes a long time. Oh well...

[153957]

One of the 👎 for tectonic is that it does not support the 'shell-escape' option, i.e. it does not support the popular minted package: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/38

This is usually not required for rendering figures generated with artist, but might be for other parts of documents which include artist figures.

[davidfokkema]

That will be a problem if we ever decide to build a TikZ-like pdf manual. For now, let's stick to Sphinx then.