Many LaTeX projects contain multiple source files which are
\included from a master file. A typical example of
this situation is a directory layout such as the following
thesis/
main.tex
abstract.tex
intro/
intro.tex
figures/
fig1.eps
fig2.eps
chapter1/
chap1.tex
figures/
fig1.eps
conclusion/
conclusion.tex
figures/
In the above case, main.tex will typically look like
% file: main.tex
\documentclass{report}
\begin{document}
\input{abstract.tex}
\input{intro/intro.tex}
\input{chapter1/chap1.tex}
\input{conclusion/conclusion.tex}
\end{document}
In such situations, you will
need to convey to Latex-Suite that main.tex is the main file
which \inputs the other files. This is done by creating
an empty file called main.tex.latexmain in the same
directory in which main.tex resides. This file is called
the master file in this manual. See Tex_MainFileExpression for an
alternative way of specifying the master file.
Here main.tex.latexmain is (obviously) a different
file from main.tex itself.
main.tex need not be renamed. This ofcourse
restricts each directory to have a single master file.
Each time Latex-Suite opens a new LaTeX file, it will try to see if it is
part of a multiple file project by searching upwards (to the root of
the file-system) from the current file's directory to see if it finds a
file of the form *.latexmain. If such a file is
found, then it is considered that the current file is part of a larger
project. The name of the LaTeX master file is inferred directly from
the first part of the *.latexmain file as described
in the example above.