pydflatex is a wrapper around pdflatex which produces a short, readable, coloured output. Specifically, pydflatex

• runs pdflatex/xelatex blazingly fast using the -batchmode option
• prints out a coloured, short summary of the warnings and errors
• hides the temporary files in various ways
• opens the pdf file if needed

pydflatex file.tex

Some useful options:

• -x: run xelatex instead of pdflatex
• -k: keep compiling on error
• -o: open the pdf in a pdf viewer
• -l: only parse existing log

A full list of options is available by running pydflatex --help.

You can install pydflatex by running

pip install -e "git+https://github.com/olivierverdier/pydflatex#egg=pydflatex"
pip install blessings

pydflatex is a collection of several independent modules to typeset the file, analyze its log, hiding the auxilliary files, etc. It is easy to write a simple python script that calls either one of those modules and does exactly what you want in your project.

For instance, to run a given file with xelatex you can call:

from pydflatex import Typesetter
t = Typesetter(options={'xetex'=True})
t.typeset(path_to_file)

In order to just print the summary of the log:

from pydflatex import LogProcessor
l = LogProcessor()
l.process_log(path_to_log_file)

Feel free to check out the other modules inside the pydflatex folder.

• blessings (optional but strongly advised): to display results in colour