General ⇒ Create text file during compile?

[stringkarma]

Hello all, my first post here.

I have been very happy with Beamer and have started to use it for all of my presentations. I have found an excellent viewer called Impressive for viewing the presentation. Now I am getting a little tired of making the .info file that tells impressive what slide transitions to use and which slides to omit from the overview.

To attempt to fix this I want to make a package that can be used to generate the .info file (which is just an ascii text file) during compile time. It seems that all I need is some LaTeX command which can write to a file (analogous to >> in bash). It seems that some functionality must exist as aux and out files are produced.

I have seen the \typeout command but how could this be used to send to a file rather than the terminal?

Thanks for any help on this or any other thoughts on my Impressive package.

[frabjous]

I've never tried this, but the following topic may provide some help:
http://www.latex-community.org/forum/vi ... f=5&t=1046

[PGScooter]

how do you compile your latex files?

If you do it from the commandline, then you could just write a bashscript with two lines-- one which compiles the latex files and one which writes your desired output.

I'm guessing you would have thought of this if you do it from the command line, but I find myself missing easy solutions so I thought I would still post.

Another alternative might be to use perltex.

[stringkarma]

perltex is an interesting thought

[josephwright]

This is all done using low-level TeX commands. You need to create a new write:

Code: Select all

\newwrite\mywrite

then open it for output

Code: Select all

\edef\mywritename{\jobname.info}
\immediate\openout\mywrite\mywritename

then write to the file

Code: Select all

\immediate\write\mywrite{<balanced text>}

Inside the write, you can create a new line with ^^J. The text is written expanded by TeX, so you also need to watch that. If you want to write any "fragile" commands, consider looking at the LaTeX \protected@write macro.