This is Rubber. Rubber is a building system for LaTeX documents. It is based on a routine that runs just as many compilations as necessary and runs companion programs like BibTeX and Makeindex when needed. The module system provides a great flexibility that virtually allows support for any package with no user intervention, as well as pre- and post-processing of the document. A good number of standard packages are supported, including graphics/graphicx with automatic conversion between various graphics formats and Metapost compilation. The associated tool "rubber-info" extracts information, such as dependency relations or post-compilation diagnostics. * Installation Compiling and running Rubber just requires Python version 2.2 or newer. For compilation, you will need the Python Distutils, which are usually included in developpement packages (in Debian, this is the python-dev package). Of course it won't be of much use without a working LaTeX environment (Rubber is known to work on teTeX and VTeX on various flavours of Unix including Darwin and Cygwin, any feedback is welcome about other systems). To compile and install Rubber, just follow the usual procedure: ./configure make make install The options for configuration can be shown using ./configure --help. * Usage As civility requires, saying `rubber --help' and `rubber-info --help' provides a short description of the command line's syntax. The included manual pages (available in English and French) and Texinfo documentation contain more precise usage information. * Author Rubber is written and maintained by Emmanuel Beffara <emmanuel@beffara.org>. Thanks to all those who provided testing, comments and suggestions, and re-thanks to those who wrote patches and bugfixes. Any kind of feedback is appreciated, in order to make this program as useful, robust and powerful as possible...