[pdftex] Typesetting a paper collection

[John Culleton]

On Monday 14 October 2002 11:13 am, Wilson, Peter R wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Magnus Lie Hetland [mailto:magnus at hetland.org]
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 7:31 PM
> > To: pdftex at tug.org
> > Subject: [pdftex] Typesetting a paper collection
> >
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > I'm trying to type set a paper collection -- basically a book-like
> > introductory part prepended to a bunch of articles. I could typeset
> > all the articles separately, but putting it all in the same file
> > seems nice, since I can get a common page numbering, TOC, index
> > etc.
> >
> > Are there any common tools for this sort of thing? The only thing
> > I've been able to sniff up so far is bibunit (and chapterbib) for
> > typesetting the paper bibliographies... But it seems I'll still
> > have to hack things quite a bit to make this work in any reasonable
> > manner. (E.g. hack the headings for the paper-chapters.) Also, I
> > can't get bibunit to work with harvard.sty (although it may just be
> > that I can't get bibunit to work, period :])
> >
> > If nothing else, can I include multi-page pdf files in pdflatex? (I
> > guess I could always just use a standard pdf file concatenation
> > tool...)
> >
> > Any pointers would be appreciated.
>
>     There is the combine class. I have not tried it with pdflatex but
> it works for latex.
>
> Peter W.
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In my book simple solutions are best for complicated situations. I use
plain tex and combine documents with the \input statement at will. I
can put the fixed stuff like font definitions, chapter macros etc. in
a separate file. The article or chapter files will be mostly text.
When combining an article into a larger document one only  needs to
comment out the statement calling the fixed stuff in the individual
file (it would be redundant.) So the article file looks like this:
\input mymacros
\chapter{How I Saved the World}
......

For the combined document I merely comment out the first line in the
article file  and call the text in with

\input mymainmacros
...
\input articleone.tex
...
The definition of \chapter could be different in the mymacros and
mymainmacros files. 

I think you have greater flexibilty in combining source files rather
than pdf files. Because of all the overhead in LaTeX this may not be
so easy however.

The great virtue in plain tex or plain pdftex is that you are in
control and you don't have to search out some special style to trick
out the system. YMMV of course. 
-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters