The latex-maven-plugin plugin for Maven is really awesome. It allows you to write your documentation in LaTeX and it automatically generates PDF documents out of it during the build process (LaTeX needs to be installed, of course).
However, the plugin has several shortcomings:
- it chokes when its source directory (usually src/main/latex) isn’t present
- you cannot skip the build of your documentation (large documents can take a while!)
- you always need to clean the output directory in order to trigger a new build
Today, I had enough and forked the project on Github (codehaus.org projects apparently moved to Github recently). After quite a bit of fiddling, I managed to get the Maven artifacts deployed to Maven Central. Finally, an even better plugin! 🙂