Question

I am writing a document that has a set of “task lists” scattered throughout. I want to have a single list of all of the tasks at the end. It seems to me that I should be able to do this with the same sort of intermediate files that are used for the table of contents, list of tables, and list of figures. But I just can’t figure out any way to do it — I’ve tried adding \addtocontents with a different extension, but that doesn’t seem to work. Does anybody have an idea of how to do this?

Answer 1

You can do:

\newwrite\tempfile

in your preamble to declare a new file writer.

Then, to open a file when you want to, you can assign the writer to a file and open it:

\immediate\openout\tempfile=lists.txt

To write to the file:

\immediate\write\tempfile{this is interesting}

Finally, close the file with:

\immediate\closeout\tempfile

To read a file, it could be as simple as \input, or you can use \newread, \openin, \read and \closein combination.

Is this what you want to do?

Edit: This “works for me”:

\documentclass{minimal}
\newwrite\tempfile
\begin{document}
\immediate\openout\tempfile=lists.tex
\immediate\write\tempfile{this is interesting}
\immediate\write\tempfile{}
\immediate\write\tempfile{this too}
\immediate\closeout\tempfile
\input{lists}
\end{document}