Tim Cross <theophil...@gmail.com> writes: > One reason is that latexmk is not installed on some systems.
Just after starting to write that this is false nowadays I realized you are right. :) See: https://mg.readthedocs.io/latexmk.html For macOS latexmk is distributed with the default TeX installation MacTeX for quite some years (IIRC at least since 2012). And it is working OOTB. As far as I know the default TeX installation for Windows is MikTeX (is this still true?), which also includes latexmk but lacks the Perl part (therefore Perl needs to be installed manually). But there is TeXLive for Windows and as far as I understand in this case Perl is also installed and latexmk works OOTB. A manual installation of TeXLive for Linux should also install latexmk (and Perl should also be available on next to every Linux box). Only some distributions bundle latexmk in a separate package - that should be easy to install (but breaks PDF creation if forgotten). Therefore: latexmk is available on all plattforms and in most cases it is already installed with the TeX system or easily installable. But not in all cases does it work OOTB and requires more work like installing Perl on Windows. In my opinion its worth to depend on this tool as it makes handling LaTeX documents much easier. On the other hand it may raise the bar for some users just to high. Hard to say. An alternative may be to use latexmk only if citations are found (new feature, new dependencies). Or a wrapper that checks whether latexmk is available and works (e.g. trying to call "latexmk --version") and falls back to the old routine of manually running the engine and bibtex/biber if necessary. -- Until the next mail..., Stefan.
