A Makefile recipe for building TeX files to PDF.
Place this Makefile in your TeX project directory.
If you have a main TeX file main.tex, or presentation.tex, or any other name, just type: make main.pdf or make presentation.pdf
The Overleaf build, for example, is very slow for large projects with many megabytes of images and text.
This makefile allows you to use editors like Sublime Text, thats provides shortcut for building using Ctrl+B. Just add the target all with the documents you want to build. For example:
all: doc1.pdf doc2.pdf
Any .pdf file can be build from its main .tex file. For example, if slides.tex is a beamer presentation, it can be build with make slides.pdf. In this way we can share figures, tables, and others contents that must be present in both documents.
The build will be done in a random temporary directory in /tmp. After a successfull build, the output pdf is copied to project directory, letting the source tree clean, without auxiliary temporary files.
All directory structure will be replicated in a temporary directory through symbolic links.