[texhax] General Advice on Combining Documents for a Thesis

[Thomas Jacobs]

Susan,

Thanks very much for the detailed reply.

Tom

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 4:42 AM, Susan Dittmar <Susan.Dittmar at gmx.de> wrote:
> It is possible to combine several stand-alone-documents into a bigger
> document without removing the \begin{document} and \end{document} lines or
> the preamble. I do this quite often. What you need for that is to make sure
> that all definitions of the document preamble of the embedded documents are
> also in the surrounding document (perhaps using a separate file for those
> definitions).
>
> There exist several ways you can accomplish this. I use the following
> approach.
>
> Start every document with:
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
> % check whether this is a stand-alone or embedded document:
> \makeatletter
> \@ifundefined{\standalonetrue}{\newif\ifstandalone}{}
> \@ifundefined{section}{\standalonetrue}{\standalonefalse}
> \makeatother
> % only read preamble if this is a stand-alone document:
> \ifstandalone
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> Then follows \documentclass{...} and the whole preamble. It will only be
> read in the stand-alone document, not in case of embedding it.
>
> This part ends with
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
> \begin{document}
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> followed possibly by a title page and the rest of the front-matter that
> should not be included in the embedded version. The true end of this block
> is
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
> \fi     %\ifstandalone
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> Everything that follows now will be used for both versions. Wherever you
> want to differentiate between the stand-alone and the embedded version, you
> can enclose it in
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
> \ifstandalone
>        % this will only be in the stand-alone version
> \else
>        % this will only be in the embedded version
> \fi     %\ifstandalone
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> The document then will end with another of those \ifstandalone blocks, but
> a special one.
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
> \ifstandalone
>    %here comes all the back-matter stuff that should not be included in the
>        %embedded version
>
>        % ...
>
> \else   %\ifstandalone
> \expandafter\endinput
> \fi             %\ifstandaline
> \end{document}
> %%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> The construct in the \else block makes sure that the \end{document} line
> (which *must* be outside of the \ifstandalone\else\fi construct!) is not
> reached in case of embedding this file.
>
> The file itself can be embedded with the \input and the \include
> commands, as you desire.
>
> In case you want to keep the different documents in different directories,
> I recommend using the fink package. It helps keeping track of the current
> filename and directory and thus allows relative file paths (relative to the
> current file, not to the main document).
>
> Hope that helps,
>
>        Susan
>
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-- 
Thomas Jacobs