wspr / latex-auxfiles

A comprehensive list of auxiliary files used by LaTeX

“Comprehensive” list of LaTeX auxiliary files

This is the rough beginnings of a document I started some time ago and never had the time to finish. The idea is to list as close to every auxiliary file that is generated by LaTeX or any 3rd party LaTeX package.

The idea is to include a short description of what each file does, its file extension, where it comes from (i.e., which package) and whether it’s safe to delete.

This work could then be useful as the canonical reference for writing scripts and exception files to delete or ignore (etc.) auxiliary LaTeX files in various contexts (cleanup scripts, version control configuration, and so on).

I’m putting what I’ve got so far up here in case some brave soul wishes to continue the work.

Will Robertson 2009

latex-auxfiles's Issues

a few extensions missing

# todo notes?
.tdo
# greek letters???
.agr
# a recorder file???
.fls
# some latexmk file
.fdb_latexmk
# biber xml file
.run.xml
# glossaries files
.xdy
.ist

missing escaping

l. 59 is missing a \verb:

Memoir also supplies a \newlistof command where the user specifies the particular file extension.

l. 73 has an unescaped _ that's causing trouble:

\EXT{asymptote}{_.pre}{Used to communicate preamble declarations from an \pkg{Asymptote} figure to the document}

Make an annoted .gitignore / .hgignore from this list

One of the main (?) uses for this list is ignoring auxiliary files when checking in changes to a latex document managed in a git/mercurial repository. To do so, we need a .gitignore/.hgignore file, which looks something like this:

# kind of files
*.ext1 # what this specific extension means
*.ext2 # what this other specific extension means

# another kind of files
*.ext3 # what this specific extension means

and so on.

Could you create something like this based on your list, and expose it here on the repository?