Hiding LaTeX metafiles from project directory

While writing a thesis or working on a large project, the number of files in the main project directory can be overwhelming. A number of metafiles are generated by LaTeX itself, for glossaries, or for bibliographies. Often, the author doesn’t touch these files. In this article, I discuss a neat way to hide these files in a separate folder, in order to reduce clutter in the main project folder.

 

 
Basic idea

The idea is to create a folder for metafiles in the main project directory and place all meta-/output-files in that folder. As a consequence, the final PDF will also be generated in that folder, even though we would want it in the project directory. I’ll show how to typeset a document while keeping all metafiles in a separate folder. Moreover, I’ll provide a solution for how to have the final PDF in the main project folder.

Project directory/
|__ main.tex
|__ main.bib
|__ main.pdf
|__ chapter1.tex
|__ chapter2.tex
|__ …
|__ metafiles/
|     |__ main.aux
|     |__ main.bcf
|     |__ main.blg
|     |__ main.glo
|     |__ main.ist
|     |__ main.log
|     |__ main.toc
|     |__ …
|__ figures/
     |__ figure1.pdf
     |__ …

 
LaTeX

Let’s first focus on LaTeX. To generate the PDF from a raw TeX/LaTeX file I use pdflatex. The command takes an optional argument: output-directory=<directory>. Through this parameter, I can write all meta-/output-files to a specific directory. I call the directory metafiles. First, I create the directory and then I typeset the LaTeX source file: main.tex from the main project directory:

mkdir metafiles
pdflatex -output-directory=metafiles main

 
Biber/Biblatex

I use biber to generate the bibliography using the biblatex package. Similar to pdflatex, biber takes an output-directory parameter. In addition, I want to specify the input-directory parameter, which tells biber where to look for the bibliography files generated by pdflatex. Note the double dash (- -) for biber parameters:

biber 
	--input-directory=metafiles
	--output-directory=metafiles
	main

 
makeglossaries/makeindex

One way to generate a glossary or list of acronyms is to use the glossaries package. The package also installs a perl script makeglossaries that simplifies the glossary generation through makeindex. See the glossaries package documentation for more details. Similar to pdflatex and biber, a parameter can be specified to tell makeglossaries where input files are located.

makeglossaries -d metafiles main

 
It seems makeindex doesn’t support a directory parameter. Therefore, either I have to manually change directory (cd) or provide the exact path to all input and output files. For example, to generate a glossary the commands would either be:

cd metafiles
makeindex -s main.ist -t main.glg -o main.gls main.glo
cd ..

or

makeindex 
	-s metafiles/main.ist 
	-t metafiles/main.glg 
	-o metafiles/main.gls 
	metafiles/main.glo

 
Output PDF in project directory

Finally, I want to have the output PDF file in my project directory, rather than in the metafiles folder. There are two possible ways. Either I simply move (mv) the file out of metafiles or I create a soft-link in the project directory, pointing to the actual file.

mv metafiles/main.pdf ./main.pdf

ln -s metafiles/main.pdf

 
Complete bash script

#!/bin/bash

# Create directory if it doesn't exist
if [ ! -d "metafiles" ]; then
  mkdir metafiles
fi

# Run pdflatex and biber with metafiles as in-/output directories
pdflatex -output-directory=metafiles main
biber --input-directory=metafiles --output-directory=metafiles main
pdflatex -output-directory=metafiles main
pdflatex -output-directory=metafiles main
makeglossaries -d metafiles main
pdflatex -output-directory=metafiles main

# Create a softlink to the output PDF
ln -s metafiles/main.pdf

 
Limitations/Extensions

The scripts are written in bash and are likely to work on Linux/UNIX-based systems, including Mac OS X. There are other ways to do the same thing, for example using latexmk or Snakemake. Also, since I’m not working with Windows, I wasn’t able to provide a command-line script for Windows users. Feel free to post your script below for others to use.

 
Source: The idea for this post and some of the code was taken from here.