Auxiliary Files – How to Store All TeX Files Long-Term

auxiliary-files

Reading through As an expert, can you always use TeX for (nearly) any kind of document?, it seems most people use TeX for almost all their documents.

My question is this: how do you store these documents on your system? At the moment, I create a folder called document_name for each document, create document_name.tex inside it, and after typesetting to get out document_name.pdf I leave all the temp/aux files in the folder with the documents. So for every single document I have a folder with a dozen files in it.

It just seems a bit messy – so how do you store these documents on your system? Do you remove (automatically?) the ~10-20 typesetting files LaTeX generates? Or am I over-thinking this?

Best Answer

Each document in a different folder, is a good archiving. Though I usually remove auxiliary files, keeping the tex source and pdf output, for convenience. The dedicated document folder keeps your file system clean if you compile again.

I organize my documents in topic folders, first such as letters, articles, books, and below subfolders such as job, private etc.

If you would like to ensure that you can easily compile your stored documents later, you could use

  • snapshot: lists the external dependencies of a LaTeX document
  • bundledoc: bundles together all the files needed to build a LaTeX document, works with snapshot
  • arlatex: a LaTeX-based archiving program; which takes the name of a master .tex file and the ancillary files it uses (such as .tex, .sty, .cls and .eps files). From these files, arlatex creates a single file that will recreate all the ancillary files when compiled with LaTeX
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