Generating All-In-One LaTex File for Journal Submission

latexpand

There is a latexpand utility that comes with the TexLive package in Ubuntu. It does almost exactly what we need: expand latex files. I used it as follows:

1

$ latexpand --expand-bbl main.bbl main.tex -o all-in-one.tex

The --expand-bbl option will replace the \bibliography command with a list of bibitem so that the main.bib does not need to be uploaded.

The all-in-one.tex will be the ONLY LaTex file we need to upload.

Figures

We still need to upload all the included figures. Often times we generate more figures than we actually include in the final manuscript. We can get the list of actually included figures using this command:

1

$ grep "includegraphics" all-in-one.tex | cut -d \{ -f 2 | cut -d \} -f 1

One caveat is that if all figures are put in a dedicated directory, e.g., ./figures, you'll have to use Latex's \graphicspath command to specify the path, and use only the file name in includegraphics. In other words, \includegraphics{./figures/abc.pdf} will not work in the all-in-one.tex unless you create that directory structure in the submission site. So instead, do this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

\usepackage{graphicx}
% note the path must ends with "/"
\graphicspath{{./figures/}}

\begin{figure}
    \includegraphics{abc.pdf}
\end{figure}

With the above organization, this Makefile snippet will generate the all-in-one.tex file and also copy all included figures into a separate directory (submitted).

1
2
3
4
5

submit:
    @mkdir -p submitted
    @latexpand --expand-bbl main.bbl main.tex -o submitted/all-in-one.tex
    @$(foreach fig, $(shell grep "includegraphics" submitted/all-in-one.tex  | cut -d \{ -f 2 | cut -d \} -f 1), /bin/cp -rfv ./figures/$(fig) submitted/;)
    # note the final semi-colon in the last command

The files in submitted directory is all the files you need to upload.