LaTeX: Support arara compilation tool as pdf engine

[Delanii]

I would like to ask, whether is it possible to support arara compilation tool as pdf engine in pandoc.
For those who are not familiar with it, it is an CLI application, that compiles given .tex file according to
directives written in the file itself or supported by configuration file.

Example:

file test.tex:

% arara: lualatex
% arara: lualatex

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\clearpage

\section{Section 1}
Just to provide source that requires to compilation in order to generate table of contents.

\clearpage

\section{Section 2}
blank
\end{document}

Compilation command is simply as:

arara test.tex

Supporting this tool would be helpfull for those users, that write documents with many compilation steps or use more "arcane" tex processing tools (pythontex, perltex - my case).
This could be implemented in form of specific block in .md source, or could be provided in separate file. For other source files than tex, latex or context this could be ignored with information, that use of filters or extensions is encouraged to achieve conversion.
arara is part of TeXlive and MikTeX distributions. For complete reference, please visit:

https://ctan.org/pkg/arara

Thank you in advance for reply, regards Tomas

[tarleb]

Interesting suggestion, but I think I don't fully understand the benefits of arara over latexmk in the context of pandoc. Is the purpose is to have a central place to configure the build? If so, maybe a pandoc defaults file would work?

[Delanii]

Oh, for me this is a little blast from the past :)

Well, the use case was that I believe that some edge-case processing tools as mentioned above are hard to incorporate with latexmk, but pretty trivial with arara (even I was "mostly alone" able to do that), and also to bring more alternatives to latexmk (I personally never understood its documentation).

Later on, I have ended up using emacs, babel, GNU make and arara to do what I wanted, so this is probably mostly suggestion originating from personal preference and affinity to creating more options when there is (mostly) one.

Defaults file could also be used (eventhough I am not sure now if it allows to state more than one compilation step, but you will know :) ), but arara allows for some crazy things like conditional compilation and other shenanigans, that I dont think are supported in defaults file.

But, actually, all of this is possible by simply using specific arara configuration file (per-project or central basis) that sets things up, so this request might be off-topic. I am not requesting it adamantly and I also dont have the skills to implement it, so feel free to close this issue as "superseeded" ... :D

Regards, Tomas

[tarleb]

Oh, for me this is a little blast from the past :)

Yeah, sorry. I'm just now combing through old issues that got lost somehow.

I think I'll close this, but add a note to #6126, so we can still consider this.