I have lost my tex file but I still have my pdf, .aux, .bak, .bbl, performance monitor file, and my text document.
Can anyone tell me if I can restore my .tex file from this? In any form?
Addition by Jake:
Note that this question is not a direct duplicate of How to convert PDF to (La)TeX?, since that question is concerned only with converting PDF to .tex without any of the additional files that are available in this case.
Best Answer
Broadly, the problem outlined here is the same as How to convert PDF to (La)TeX?. The reason is that at best the various additional files contain only a small subset of the information needed to understand the structure of the
.texsource file. I don't want to repeat all of the info in File extensions related to LaTeX, etc, but as a summary:.logand.blgfiles are logs: they tell us what happened in the LaTeX and BibTeX runs, respectively. That will be useful in working out which packages were used in the.texfile, but that alone does not get us very far (no custom settings or actual input)..bblfile may help with the bibliography part of the document. If you did not usingbiblatexthen the.bblfile is a formatted bibliography, but if you usedbiblatexthen it's not. Moreover, it does not help with the citations that link to the bibliography, and most of the time the bibliography will be a relatively small part of the entire document..auxfile tells us about information transferred between LaTeX runs, so for example labels used in the.texfile, but not where they might have been cross-referenced, etc.As you'll see, the amount of information in the various additional files is at best quite limited, and in most real documents will form only a small part of what's needed to reconstruct the
.texsource. Thus there will still be a lot of work to do extracting data from the.pdf, and it may well be easier to ignore the other files and 'start from scratch', reconstruction-wise.