10 Multifile Documents

The following is relevant when working with documents spread over many files:

• RefTeX has full support for multifile documents. You can edit parts of several (multifile) documents at the same time without conflicts. RefTeX provides functions to run grep, search and query-replace on all files which are part of a multifile document.
• All files belonging to a multifile document should define a File Variable (TeX-master for AUCTeX or tex-main-file for the standard Emacs LaTeX mode) containing the name of the master file. For example, to set the file variable TeX-master, include something like the following at the end of each TeX file:

  %%% Local Variables: ***
  %%% mode:latex ***
  %%% TeX-master: "thesis.tex"  ***
  %%% End: ***
  

  AUCTeX with the setting

  (setq-default TeX-master nil)
  

  will actually ask you for each new file about the master file and insert this comment automatically. For more details see the documentation of the AUCTeX (see Multifile in The AUCTeX User Manual), the documentation about the Emacs (La)TeX mode (see TeX Print in The GNU Emacs Manual) and the Emacs documentation on File Variables (see File Variables in The GNU Emacs Manual).

• The context of a label definition must be found in the same file as the label itself in order to be processed correctly by RefTeX. The only exception is that section labels referring to a section statement outside the current file can still use that section title as context.
• RefTeX knows about the \include and \input macros. In case you use different commands to include files in a multifile document, customize the variable reftex-include-file-commands.