Useful LaTex One-Liners For Reports/Papers/Etc.

Some useful LaTex one-liners that I’ve accumulated over the years. You can also find these tools here

Show all errors, warnings, and undefined messages

Very basic but useful to analyse a log file after compilation with location in log file for further analysis

grep -iHEn "error|warning|undefined" *.log

Find all the duplicated labels in a directory

Useful if referencing a figure results in warnings/errors

grep -ERh "\\\\label\{\w*:\w*\}" --include="*.tex" \
     | tr -d " " | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1>1 {print $0}'

Validate references.bib

We use Pezmc/BibLatex-Check for this one.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Pezmc/BibLatex-Check/master/biblatex_check.py \ 
    2>/dev/null | python - \ 
    -b $(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -name "*.bib" | head -n1) \ 
    -a $(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -name "*.aux" | head -n1)

Find all the unused labels

Calling this one a “one-liner” is pushing it, but it’s very useful nonetheless so it’s being included.

REF=($(IFS=;grep -ERoh "\\\\\w*ref\{\w*:\w*\}" . | sort | uniq | awk -F{ '{print $2}' | tr -d '}'))
LABEL=($(IFS=;grep -ERoh "\\\\label\{\w*:\w*\}" . | sort | uniq | awk -F{ '{print $2}' | tr -d '}'))
for i in $LABEL
do
    echo $REF | grep -iq " $i "
    if [[ $? -eq 1 ]]
    then
        printf "\033[0;31mUNUSED LABEL: \033[0;32m$i\033[0m\n"
    fi
done

Get document (rough) word count

This doesn’t exclude referencing etc. but accurate enough for rough estimates.

pdftotext main.pdf - | \
    grep -ohE "\b[a-zA-Z]{2,}\b" | \
    tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | \
    sort | uniq > /tmp/words.txt; pdftotext main.pdf - | \
    grep -ohFf /tmp/words.txt | wc -w

Spell check

Requires aspell-en.

1. Non-interactive - list of misspelled words
   • pdftotext main.pdf - | grep -ohE "\b[a-zA-Z]{2,}\b" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sort | uniq | aspell list -t | sort | uniq -c
2. Interactive spell-check - file by file
   • aspell -c -t main.tex # Replace main.tex with whatever tex file you're checking