What's the relation of file.4ct and file.4tc generated by MikTex's latex.exe

Question

I'm currently investigation problems with our scripted documentation generation (.tex -> .pdf and .chm) and I have to admit that I'm pretty clueless when it comes to generating LaTeX.

Long story short:

1. PDF is correctly generated via pdflatex -output-format=pdf -interaction=batchmode ourfile.tex

2. Script then goes on to call 3 times:

   latex -interaction=batchmode \makeatletter\def\HCode{\futurelet\HCode\HChar}\def\HChar{\ifx"\HCode\def\HCode"##1"{\Link##1}\expandafter\HCode\else\expandafter\Link\fi}\def\Link#1.a.b.c.{\g@addto@macro\@documentclasshook{\RequirePackage[#1,html]{tex4ht}}\let\HCode\documentstyle\def\documentstyle{\let\documentstyle\HCode\expandafter\def\csname tex4ht\endcsname{#1,html}\def\HCode####1{\documentstyle[tex4ht,}\@ifnextchar[{\HCode}{\documentstyle[tex4ht]}}}\makeatother\HCode html,5.a.b.c.\input ourfile.tex

3. This generates the following files: ourfile.4ct ourfile.4tc ourfile.aux ourfile.dvi ourfile.idx ourfile.log ourfile.xref

4. Script then goes on to process the .4ct file which seems to be some kind of TOC file containing titles and references. The script uses this data to generate the TOC data for the chm project file (hhp file).

However, when I alternately ran the command from (2) a 4th, 5th, 6th time I could see that the contents of the .4ct and .4tc file would swap each time I ran the command. That is:

a) run latex ... => ourfile.4ct = 126 lines / ourfile.4tc = 793 lines

b) run latex ... => ourfile.4ct = 793 lines / ourfile.4tc = 126 lines

c) run latex ... => ourfile.4ct = 126 lines / ourfile.4tc = 793 lines

d) etc.

The generated .log file only refers to ourfile.4ct and at the first occurrence I see the following warning ...

---------------------------------------------------------
l.1 --- TeX4ht warning --- If not done so, the index is to be processed by
  tex '\def\filename{{Td_g}{idx}{4dx}{ind}} \input  idxmake.4ht'
  makeindex -o Td_g.ind Td_g.4dx
instead of
  makeindex -o Td_g.ind Td_g.idx
On some platforms, the quotation marks ' should be
 replaced by double quotation marks " or eliminated.
---------------------------------------------------------  ---

... if that's of any use.

Thanks for any pointers!

Answer 1

Those files aren't specific to MikTeX, but to the tex4ht package (the hypertext generator). They're not documented, so they probably contain temporary data needed to produce the end result (the HTML). Are you in any way unhappy with the output? If so, you need to ask the Tex4ht authors in terms of what is wrong with your HTML output, not the intermediary files - they would probably just tell you, "Oh, those are internal files, don't worry about them."