Oh wow, I didn’t even think about this notation: *.pdf

1. What does **/*.pdf mean?
2. The first part of the script is able to work with multiple files but the part where the latex action is called gets a filename as input. Is there any way to extract every string of the list ${{ steps.files.outputs.all }} and run following code on every item:

- name: Compile LaTeX document
    uses: xu-cheng/latex-action@v2
    with:
       root_file: filename

Thanks for your help!

What does **/*.pdf mean?

The ** matches any number of directories, so it would find any PDF files you might have in subdirectories (e.g. a/b/c.pdf). If you don’t have any of those or don’t want them in the artifact you can just remove that part.

Is there any way to extract every string of the list ${{ steps.files.outputs.all }} and run following code on every item

There isn’t any looping on the step level, but the README for the xu-cheng/latex-action action says you can give multiple files as a multi-line string (which might require some formatting).

Or you could install the necessary packages on the runner (Ubuntu has texlive packages) and run pdflatex or lualatex in a shell loop.

The ** matches any number of directories, so it would find any PDF files you might have in subdirectories (e.g. a/b/c.pdf ). If you don’t have any of those or don’t want them in the artifact you can just remove that part.

Well I think that can be helpful.

There isn’t any looping on the step level, but the README for the xu-cheng/latex-action action says you can give multiple files as a multi-line string (which might require some formatting).

Yeah I also found that but how do I format the output list to something like that:

root_file: |
      file1.tex
      file2.tex

I just did some experimenting, based on hints from this thread:

<a href="https://github.community/t/set-output-truncates-multiline-strings/16852">set-output Truncates Multiline Strings</a> <a class="badge-wrapper  bullet" href="/c/code-to-cloud/github-actions/41"><span class="badge-category-parent-bg" style="background-color: #6a737d;"></span><span class="badge-category-bg" style="background-color: #2188ff;"></span><span style="" data-drop-close="true" class="badge-category clear-badge" title="Discussion and questions about GitHub Actions—automation for all of your development workflows, now with world-class CI/CD.">GitHub Actions</span></a>

Hi, I am using this code to create a release for one of our repositories: - shell: bash id: release_description run: | description=$(./resources/get_release_description.sh ${{ steps.versioning.outputs.cli_version }}) echo $description echo "::set-output name=description::$description" if: startsWith(steps.commit_message.outputs.commit_message, 'Version change') - shell: bash run: | echo ${{ steps.release_description.…

The key is that to have newlines in an output you need to URL-encode them. I’ve been using Python to do the space-to-newline conversion because shlex makes it easy to handle escapes (e.g. a file name containing a space) when splitting the space-separated list:

airtower-luna/hello-github-actions/blob/ccaec46bba8f11f342b8ba695f795b830d8d7e57/.github/workflows/multiline-output.yaml#L14-L24

- name: make list newline separated
  id: lines
  run: |
    import os
    import shlex
    # %0A is a URL-encoded newline (\n)
    output = '%0A'.join(shlex.split(os.environ['INPUT_LIST']))
    print(f'::set-output name=list::{output}')
  shell: python3 {0}
  env:
    INPUT_LIST: ${{ steps.files.outputs.list }}

You could use something similar to convert the list you have. 🙂

Thanks a lot for investing time in uploading an example, I finally got it working.

Thanks for your time!