Reducing the console output of LaTeX

Question

When I run pdfLaTeX, I get very verbose output:

(/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/tex/generic/pgf/frontendlayer/tikz/librarie
s/tikzlibrarycalc.code.tex)
...

Is there a script to soak up all the verbose output and allow the important stuff to pass through, like errors, overfull hboxes, and so on?

Also, is there a reason why it sends a hard return to the console for lines longer than 79 characters?

Answer 1

The line feed after 79 characters is defined in Web2C's configuration file, called texmf.cnf. The variable name is max_print_line which you can change in the file (not recommended in general, but in that case the setting is really harmless); and if you run TeX from a shell you can also set this variable in the environment (export max_print_line=1048576 for Korn-like shells, set max_print_line 1048576 for C shells).

I am not aware of a way to forbid line breaks entirely; I only set the variable to a very large value when this behaviour annoys me.

Answer 2

The solution is

1. Either use the -interaction batchmode switch or put \batchmode at the start of the document(or anywhere you want to stop displaying output).

2. Use \scrollmode, \nonstopmode, or \errorstopmode anywhere you want to enable output generation. \errorstopmode enables errors interaction.

3. Use \batchmode anywhere you want to disable output generation.

   • To reduce clutter use the command line switch, and use the following template.

>

     \begin{document}
     \scrollmode
     ....
     \batchmode
     \end{document}    

This will only show output from latex between the the \scrollmode and \batchmode and very little else.

---

If you are using WinEdt(or possibly some other automated process) it seems to like to open 0 length pdf's for no reason. It also doesn't seem to have an easy way to check for 0 length files.

• Add the follow to the ExecCompiler.edt file in the \Exec directory right after the string "// Check if the Output was Generated ...". (It is near the bottom)

ExecCompiler.edt

Run('DeleteFileIfEmpty.exe "%P\%N.pdf"','%P',0,0,'%N.pdf',0,0,1);
IfFileExists("%P\%N.pdf", "Relax;", !"JMP('Exit');");

• Here is C code of for a simple tool that deletes a file if it is empty.

DeleteFileIfEmpty.cpp

#include <tchar.h>
#include <Windows.h>

long GetFileSize(const TCHAR *fileName)
{    
    WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA fileInfo;
    if (NULL == fileName) return -1;
    if (!GetFileAttributesEx(fileName, GetFileExInfoStandard, (void*)&fileInfo)) return -1;
    return (long)fileInfo.nFileSizeLow;
}

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    argv = CommandLineToArgvW(GetCommandLine(), &argc); if (argc < 2) return -1;

    _TCHAR *fn = new _TCHAR[1000]; ZeroMemory(fn, 1000*sizeof(_TCHAR)); _TCHAR *fn2 = fn; 
    for(int i = 1; i < argc; i++) { _tcscpy(fn2, argv[i]); fn2 += _tcslen(argv[i]); _tcscpy(fn2++, _T(" ")); } fn2--;
    if (GetFileSize(fn) > 0) return -1;

    DeleteFile(fn);
    return 1;
}

You can download this file at

http://www.freefilehosting.net/deletefileifempty

Put the DeleteFileIfEmpty.exe in a path that is in the %path% environment or the bin dir that WinEdt is setup to use.

---

This was tested with WinEdt6 and works. Reduces output clutter(no package loading msgs, banners, etc...) and doesn't open up empty files when there is an error.

Answer 3

This is what the silence package is intended to help with.

Answer 4

Rubber has (among other things) some filtering capabilities, and generally gives errors in a very compressed form. You can also tell it to give you only certain kinds of warnings using --warn=.

Answer 5

In order to neatly format the output, I created my own solution: pydflatex. You would compile a file with

pydflatex myfile.tex

And get an output along the lines of

On top of giving a neat, condensed output, it will also hide the auxilliary files, so as not to clutter your folder.

Edit It is now also possible to run

pydflatex -l file.tex

which will parse an existing log without typesetting.

Answer 6

I have used rubber-info and it is the best TeX error parser I have seen. The package is not actively maintained though. I have it report error through growl as in this screenshot:

Answer 7

The modern solution is latexmk.

Answer 8

This is a comparison of the existing methods (plus a new suggestion by me below)

---

If you come across this question, you most likely want to quickly find the parts that you're interested in in the log file/output.

(the question itself only concern terminal output (stdout), but the errors/messages are in both the log file and terminal)

In my experience, the parts that you're possibly interested in are

• (most frequent) The errors raised by TeX.
• (less frequent, only if you do some TeX programming) Debug error messages printed by \show, \showtokens, \tl_show:n, \regex_show:n or similar.
• The warnings produced by TeX.
• Whether it can parse an existing file. (so you don't need to change your existing compilation command)

The table below compares the tools, with respect to the conditions above. The first line is my new suggestion.

The file in (7) is used.

Tool	On error	On \show (3)	On warning	Parse log file
texfot cat a.log	Configurable	Configurable	Continue	Yes
xelatex a.tex	Prompt (4)	Prompt	Continue	No
xelatex a.tex < /dev/null	Stop	Stop	Continue	No
latexmk [-g] a.tex	Stop	Stop	Continue	No
texfot xelatex a.tex	Stop	Stop	Continue	Partial (6)
xelatex a.tex < <(yes "")	Continue	Continue	Continue	No
latexmk [-g] -latexoption=-interaction=nonstopmode a.tex	Continue	Continue	Continue	No
texfot xelatex -interaction=nonstopmode a.tex	Continue	Continue	Continue	Partial
xelatex -interaction batchmode	Hide and continue	Hide and continue	Hide	No
latexmk -silent [-g] -latexoption=-interaction=nonstopmode a.tex	Hide and continue	Hide and continue	Hide	No
xelatex -interaction batchmode with manual \nonstopmode ... \batchmode	Hide and continue (1)	Configurable	Hide	No
rubber-info a.tex	Configurable	Hide	Configurable	Yes
pplatex -i a.log (5)	Configurable	Hide	Configurable	Yes
silence package	?	?	?	No
pydflatex a.tex	?	?	?	?

(1): The user could wrap it manually, but it requires knowing where the error is in the first place.
(2): About texfot --interactive xelatex a.tex: The flag doesn't have any effect, see pdflatex bash script to supress all output except error messages?
(3): The "Stop" case can always be converted to "Continue". See How can I make TeX stop on the first error, but do not stop on \show (or \tl_show:n)? (disclaimer: my question)
(4): See How can one stop LaTeX compilation? for what to do with the prompt.
(5): May requires compilation from source if the provided binary does not work. Supports cmake.
(6): "Partial" means being able to run the compiler with any option, but requires re-run to filter.
(7): The example file:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\begin{document}

\ExplSyntaxOn
\def \a {123}
\show \a
\tl_show:N \a
\tl_analysis_show:n {123}
\ExplSyntaxOff

Some example formula x^2+1=0
\end{document}

Regardless of the method, because LaTeX log file is relatively unstructured, any solution that parses the log file is subject to error.

Answer 9

Having read the answers, I ended up with this lightweight solution:

pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode paper.tex 1> log || cat log

Answer 10

Consider also following tool:

Pretty Print LaTeX: pplatex

pplatex --cmd <yourlatexbinary> -q -- latexfile.tex

Based on the parser of kile.

Note about availability:
Not part of MikTex or TexLive and not contained in Debian/Ubuntu repositories and there is also no Mac OSX homebrew formula. However, custom installation is not difficult. Update 2016: links on github to pre-compiled binaries for linux-x64 and windows are available.

Answer 11

Today I got very tired of pdflatex trashing my console at each run.

So after too many years of compliance I wrote this script for my .bashrc.

# Compile tex file containing svg
svgtex () {
    pdflatex -shell-escape -halt-on-error -output-directory="out" \
        $1 1> /dev/null
    [[ $? = 0 ]] || echo `grep Error out/${$1/tex/log}`
}

I share it as OP asked for a script, and latexmk is not to be found on my distro. Defining a function in .bashrc works like an alias, except you can pass it arguments (e.g. filename=$1)

I pass the following options:

• -shell-escape: required to include svg files, which my defense slides contain
• -halt-on-error: stop killing the terminal by hanging in batchmode or whatever
• -output-dir: stop trashing the source directory with .nav .toc .out .log .aux .snm files... am I forgetting any?

I just use it as svgtex file.tex and no output is produced.

N.B. Although only stdout is redirected to /dev/null, no error messages are printed in case of failure, so it seems pdflatex does not use stderr. Hence the last line to check the return code pdflatex and print only error lines.

You can always do less out/file.log if you want to know all about it.

Answer 12

On GNU/Linux I've found texfot to be the most reliable, and it comes packaged with TexLive. It filters the output of the command you pass it:

texfot pdflatex …options your-document.tex

See this answer for more details.

Answer 13

As mentioned in other answers, there are many tools that may help with this. I have recently uploaded texlogsieve to CTAN, which is my own attempt at a texlua script to filter the LaTeX log file. I like it :) . The main selling points are

1. Lots of options to choose what to show/hide;
2. Reliable line unwrapping;
3. Multi-line messages are treated as a single entity.

Note that it does not treat error messages specially (they are just dumped to the output together with the other unfiltered messages). Still, calling texlogsieve -l unknown --no-page-delay --no-shipouts --no-summary LOGFILE should give you something very close to "only error messages".

Answer 14

You can use ltx2any to compile your document. This will not only compile your document, but also produce a summary of errors and warnings: