Re: Output filenames and the inconsistency of the `file` variable

[Ikumi Keita]

Hi Al,

Your proposition sounds very much like the one proposed in this list a
while ago. See the thread beginning with
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex-devel/2020-06/msg00031.html
. I'm cc'ing to Tohiko Looka, the original poster of the above thread.

The thread seems to be dormant now though Colin and Tassilo expressed
their interests in that idea. How about discussing among those looking
forward to this idea, to refine and incubate full-fledged implementation
ready to incorporate into AUCTeX?

(I personally am not much inclined to that idea of using separate build
directory, but cooperation between the folks with similar spirits in
this list is of course welcome :-)

Best regards,
Ikumi Keita

>>>>> Al Haji-Ali <abdo.haji.ali@gmail.com> writes:
> For the past 3 months, I have been using the `--output-directory`
> option of tex compilation engines (like pdflatex) to save all output
> and temporary files in an "auctex/build" sub-directory next to my tex
> files.
> I found this arrangement to be very convenient. For version control, I
> simply gitignore the "auctex" directory (which also includes the
> temporary `el` files in my setup) instead of having to ignore
> extensions like pdf. Also, having multiple (independent) tex files in
> the same directory did not clutter my source files with temporary
> ones.

> The way I implemented this is by:
> 1. Passing the `--output-directory` option to pdflatex through
> "TeX-command-extra-options"
> 2. Advising TeX-master-file to return a path in the output directory
> instead of the current directory whenever an output extension (or
> those in `*-clean-*-suffixes`) is passed as an argument.
> 3. This is not relevant to AUCTeX, but I also implemented two
> functions that can be executed in a tex file: one to copy the output
> file from the build directory to another one and another function to
> attach the pdf (from the build directory) in an email.

> This worked surprisingly well! However, because AUCTeX has these lines
> of code where the path is constructed using a string concatenation
> rather than calling `TeX-active-master`, this meant that I had to
> patch some functions to ensure everything worked as intended
> (including viewing the pdf and tex-syncing it).

> I plan to propose the whole setup as a contribution to AUCTeX, but I
> wanted to first make sure of the least disruptive way to add this
> functionality natively. The required modification of TeX-master-file
> is not disruptive, since it can be controlled with a flag. So the only
> potentially disruptive changes are the ones I outlined in my previous
> email.