Sciquill recipes

Sciquill build instructions are just shell scripts stored in a makefile. Here are some useful recipes I've created over the years that you can add to your makefile:

Converting an .xls file to .pdf with libreoffice:

Running libreoffice on the command-line like this will silently fail if you already have libreoffice running. If you use a containerized version, you can get around that issue. Use my libre docker container so you can run it while the real one is open. Or, this problem is also solved by using bulker.

budget:
    echo "Make sure libreoffice isn't already open"
    libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf \
    --outdir output \
    src/budget_worksheet.xlsx

To set page printing limits in libreoffice calc:
- go to View > Page Break - now select the area to print - choose: Format > Print Ranges > Define

Converting a .docx to .pdf with libreoffice:

pdf:
    soffice --convert-to pdf output/toc.docx \
    --outdir output

Merging PDFs with ghostscript:

merge:
    $(mbin)/mergepdf output/merged.pdf \
    output/title_page.pdf \
    output/research_proposal.pdf \
    output/assembly_plan.pdf

Adding page numbers

To add page numbers:

  1. put the PDF document into the tex_utilities/addpages.tex file.
  2. Run: pdflatex addpages.tex
  3. Page numbers are added at addpages.pdf!