Does anyone know why the filecontents environment was introduced?
What is the purpose of packing it all in one file, but without using a tarball?
1 Answer
It's a natural extension of the ideas of docstrip that extracts comments and writes out the .sty and .cls files of the LaTeX distribution. It could have been written in perl or something but writing it in TeX makes it more portable to anyone who has tex at all.
Note that in 1991-1993 while latex2e was being developed, perl (introduced 1987) and a portable zip (info-zip introduced 1989) were not as commonly installed as they are today. Even now it is much easier to add small .csv data files or local .sty files to examples posted to this site by using filecontents than it is to post them as separate files and have to give instructions about saving and file names, or posting to some other site as a zip or tar file and then hoping people on windows can unpack it.
answered Mar 26, 2013 at 22:47
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2Wow, in 1993 they already prepared latex2e for use with stackexchange ;-)– arneyMar 26, 2013 at 22:55
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3@arney well we were probably thinking more of
comp.text(.tex)but it's the same questions, just recycled:-) Mar 26, 2013 at 23:02
filecontentskeeps everything together in one.texfile.source2edocumentation, p 361): "The environmentfilecontentsis intended for passing the contents of packages, options, or other files along with a document in a single file.".epsfile inclusion. : tex.stackexchange.com/questions/47341/…