Compiling and publishing multilingual LaTeX with GitHub

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 19:14:22 +0000

I have been wanting to publish my CV in my personal site for quite some time, but first I needed to make sure that it was always up-to-date. I.e. that it was compiled and published automatically every time I made some changes to the source file.

Since 5 years ago, my CV is written using LaTeX, using (and modifying) the Awesome CV template. On top of that, I added a few things to make it bilingual, compiling either in Spanish or English, making the document available in multiple languages.

Thanks to iflang, depending on the option you pass to the babel package, the document will be rendered in Spanish or English.

\documentclass[a4paper]{awesome-cv}
\usepackage[]{babel}
\usepackage{iflang}

\newcommand{\es}[1]{\IfLanguageName{spanish}{#1}{}}
\newcommand{\en}[1]{\IfLanguageName{english}{#1}{}}

\begin{document}
  \es{¡Hola Mundo!}
  \en{Hello World!}
\end{document}

Nevertheless, we need to change by hand, it can’t be automated. A simple option to automate it would be to use sed to modify that file, but it may not be installed in the system (Windows…), and I wanted a pure LaTeX solution.

Juan Carlos Fabero gave me the idea of using a couple of wrappers that define a variable and import the contents of main.tex. We’d have to add a couple of lines to the main file to take that variable into account, checking if it’s been defined.

Modifying `main.tex`

% Usamos la variable si está definida
\ifdefined\babellang
    \usepackage[\babellang]{babel}
% Si no, usamos el por defecto (o cambiado manualmente desde el IDE)
\else
    \usepackage[english]{babel}
\fi

File `english.tex`

\def\babellang{english}
\input{main.tex}

File `spanish.tex`

\def\babellang{spanish}
\input{main.tex}

This way, if we compile english.tex, we will get an English document, and if we compile spanish.tex we’ll get the Spanish one.

Automation with GitHub pages

We can’t forget about doing all this automatically. The source files are located in a GitHub project, and every time a new commit is pushed, the files are compiled and published using GitHub pages. Both files are available through github.io:

The workflow used is very simple, I created it just using the web interface, adding a build action that uses latex-action to compile the document, and then a publish action to upload the generated files to GitHub pages. Furthermore, I added an assert to check that the files are only two pages long.

name: CI

# Controls when the workflow will run
on:
  # Triggers the workflow on push or pull request events but only for the "main" branch
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

# A workflow run is made up of one or more jobs that can run sequentially or in parallel
jobs:
  build:
    # The type of runner that the job will run on
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    # Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Build LaTeX
        uses: xu-cheng/latex-action@v2
        with:
          latexmk_use_xelatex: true
          # Compile multiple documents
          root_file: |
            english.tex
            spanish.tex            
      - name: Assert built files are 2 pages long
        run: |
          sudo apt-get install -y poppler-utils
          [ $(pdfinfo english.pdf | awk '/^Pages:/ {print $2}') -le 2 ]
          [ $(pdfinfo spanish.pdf | awk '/^Pages:/ {print $2}') -le 2 ]          
      - name: Build Github page
        run: |
          mv english.pdf _site/David_Davo_CV_English.pdf
          mv spanish.pdf _site/David_Davo_CV_Spanish.pdf          
      - name: Upload GitHub Pages artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v1.0.3
  deploy:
    needs: build
    
    # Grant GITHUB_TOKEN the permissions required to make a Pages deployment
    permissions:
      pages: write      # to deploy to Pages
      id-token: write   # to verify the deployment originates from an appropriate source

    # Deploy to the github-pages environment
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}

    # Specify runner + deployment step
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v1
        with:
          artifact-name: build

The final touch is a small raw HTML page that redirects to my personal webpage, in the event someone goes into the root of the page: daviddavo.github.io/22CV

GitHub Actions on David Davó's dev log

Compiling and publishing multilingual LaTeX with GitHub

Modifying main.tex

File english.tex

File spanish.tex

Automation with GitHub pages

Modifying `main.tex`

File `english.tex`

File `spanish.tex`