A small but common issue… My CV is written with \LaTeX¹, and in France, CVs are expected to be 1 page long (unless you have a lot of experience). This can be quite challenging.

When reducing the length of my CV to 1 page, I often end with a 2-page PDF with a completely blank second page. I then use stapler to remove this empty page. But doing this every time quickly gets annoying! So I need a way to do this automatically when I update my CV. And it needs to be smart: it must remove the second page, but only if it’s empty, so I can check what overflowed if there’s more than one page.

I found a way to do all of this in my Makefile:

all: path/to/cv.pdf

%.pdf: %.tex
	latexmk -xelatex -cd $<
	if [ $$(pdfinfo $@ | awk -F: '$$1 == "Pages" {print $$2}') -gt 1 ] \
	&& [ -z "$$(pdftotext -f 2 $@ - | tr -d '[:space:]')" ]; then \
	    echo "Cutting to 1 page"; \
	    stapler cat $@ 1 $@-1page; \
	    mv $@-1page $@; \
	fi

.PHONY: clean mrproper
clean:
	find . -name '*.tex' -exec latexmk -c -cd {} \;

mrproper:
	find . -name '*.tex' -exec latexmk -C -cd {} \;
	find -type d -name auto -exec rm -rf {} +

This uses stapler, awk, tr, pdfinfo and pdftotext. On Arch Linux, you can find them with the coreutils, gawk, poppler and aur/stapler packages.