[Tex/LaTex] How to use the aux file

auxiliary-files

This is not a terribly well-formed question, sorry. I don't really know what information is in the .aux file, or how I can make use of it in other (related) documents. What's the best reference for understanding how this works?

One common thing I would like to be able to do is the following: I have a book that contains lots of \labels. I would like to be able to reference those labels from the solutions manual, which is separately created (as a .tex file) and generated (as a PDF).

Best Answer

If you want to know what is in the aux-file: Open it in an editor and look it up. Actually every package (and you too) can write something to the aux-file if it want. So the aux-file normally contains quite a lot informations which are very document specific and which would cause troubles in another document.

So if you want to read an external aux-file you must be careful. E.g. an aux-file contains lines which should be written to the toc-file (\@writefile{toc}) which you don't want to process in this case. The xr-package mentioned by Boris e.g. loops through external aux-files and looks for \newlabel commands but ignores everything else.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Include aux file in tex source

You can use either of the environments filecontents or filecontents*. Each of those takes one required argument, the name of the file to be created, and then then it creates that file with the contents of the environment.

The unstarred version adds a few lines of comments at the beginning of the file describing how the file was created, the starred version doesn't add anything to the contents of the environment.

You use these environments before the \documentclass command. That is, you'd beging your latex file with, e.g.,

\begin{filecontents*}{myotherstuff.aux}
\newlabel{\whatever}...
...
\end{filecontents*}

and your \documentclass command comes after that.

[Tex/LaTex] Read in number of citations from aux file

Okay, after playing around with the syntax a lot, I got something to work by modifying the code in xcite (which loops through the aux file to pull out all of the \bibcite items) so that it just counts the number of \bibcite items in the aux file. Here is my modified version of the sample document, with added code between the lines beginning with %%. I don't have much experience with writing TeX macros, so I'd appreciate any suggestions for improvement.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}

\newcount\bibcounter
\bibcounter=0

%% start citation counting
\def \maindoc {mymaindoc}
\newread\auxfile
\openin\auxfile = \maindoc .aux

\long\def\bibcitecheck#1#2\bibcitecheckstop{%
\ifx#1\bibcite
\advance \bibcounter by 1
\fi
}

\newif\ifnoteof
\loop
\read\auxfile to \holder

\ifeof\auxfile
\noteoffalse
\else
\expandafter\bibcitecheck\holder...\bibcitecheckstop
\noteoftrue
\fi

\ifnoteof
\repeat

\closein\auxfile
%% End citation counting
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\apptocmd{\thebibliography}{\global\c@NAT@ctr \bibcounter\relax}{}{}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

Here we cite reference \citealp{firstCite}.

\begin{thebibliography}{99}
    \bibitem{firstCite} Dow, W. \& Jones, E.A.,
     {\it Wall Street Journal},
     March 29, 1929.
    \end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

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Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Include aux file in tex source

[Tex/LaTex] Read in number of citations from aux file

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