As part of my course, I've been traditionally maintaining a problem
sheet in latex and compile two versions, one with answers, and one
without. To achieve that, I hide the answers based on whether a certain
variable was defined in latex or not and then compile it accordingly:
with answers: pdflatex sheet.tex
without answers: pdflatex "\def\noanswers{yes}\input{sheet.tex}"
I defined a new converter in LyX do achieve the same but I could not do
it without wrapping the 2nd command in a shell script (I'm using
windows). What I did:
- defined a new file format pdf6: PDF (pdflatex-na) with the same
settings as pdf2: PDF (pdflatex).
- defined a converter Latex (pdflatex) -> PDF (pdflatex-na) with the
following for converter: pdflatex "\def\noanswers{yes}\input{$$i}"
Checking the lyx preferences file, I see it correctly escaped as:
\converter "pdflatex" "pdf6" "pdflatex
\"\\def\\noanswers{yes}\\input{$$i}\"" "latex=pdflatex"
However, when I try to use it (update or export) then LyX launches the
converter and keeps waiting for it to terminate. Investigating the
matter with a task manager like Process Hacker or Process Explorer, in
order to see what command was actually executed, I notice that LyX
started a cmd shell which in fact executed the following:
pdflatex "\def\noanswers{yes}\input{ }" sheet.tex
Note the empty \input{} and the file name sheet.tex at the end, instead
of inside \input{sheet.tex}.
I tried with the other variables $$b.tex, $$p, $$r etc, to no avail.
Unless I'm missing something, this looks like a bug. Is there a python
script anywhere that launches the cmd shell? It's probably there and I
could fix it.
My workaround is to wrap the whole thing in a cmd script pdflatexna.bat
placed in lyx/bin with the contents:
@pdflatex "\def\noanswers{yes}\input{%~1}"
(the %~1 instead of %1 is to strip any double quotes)
... and then use the following command for the converter: pdflatexna $$i
Cheers,
Bogdan.
