No support for Asymptote in AUCTeX

Question

I got a problem with my Emacs/AUCTeX setup. I'm using a lot of Asymptote graphics in my TeX documents, but there is a big problem to compile such documents inside of Emacs with AUCTeX. However I can compile those document from within Kile.

For Emacs/AUCTeX this workaround works:

1. call from Emacs pdflatex(compile latex)
2. manually from the shell: asy filename-1.asy
3. call from Emacs pdflatex(compile latex)

How can I tell AUCTeX to call the asy compiler automatically if needed?

Answer 1

You can call latexmk via AUCTeX which with some minor configuration can compile LaTeX with Asymptote figures.

According to the Asymptote manual you can use latexmk to compile LaTeX files containing Asymptote figures with a single command (§7):

An even better method for processing a LaTeX file with embedded Asymptote code is to use the latexmk utility from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk/ after putting the contents of http://asymptote.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/asymptote/trunk/asymptote/doc/latexmkrc in a file latexmkrc in the same directory. The command

latexmk -pdf latexusage

will then call Asymptote automatically, recompiling only the figures that have changed. Since each figure is compiled in a separate system process, this method also tends to use less memory.

What this means is that if you add the following to your latexmkrc

$pdf_mode = 1;
sub asy {return system("asy '$_[0]'");}
add_cus_dep("asy","eps",0,"asy");
add_cus_dep("asy","pdf",0,"asy");
add_cus_dep("asy","tex",0,"asy");

and run

latexmk your_document

it will do all the necessary steps to produce a PDF of your LaTeX document with Asymptote figures. Such a command can be invoked via AUCTeX to do what you want, i.e. latexmk can be called from AUCTeX.