Table of Contents

• Overview
• Requirements
• Installation
• Documentation
• License

Overview

If you are anything like me, your latex documents compile from files hierarchically nested in directories. For example, your latex project might looks something like:

bib/
    references.bib
ms/
    ms-discussion.tex
    ms-figures.tex
    ms-intro.tex
    ms-results.tex
    ms-tables.tex
    ms.tex
utils/
    macros.tex
    preamble.tex
images/
    fig1.pdf
    fig2.pdf

It's nice to keep things organized! However, when it comes time to submit your manuscript to a journal, you can't submit your whole directory structure. If you have a lot of files, it becomes a real pain to update all the paths in the files so that the document will compile from all its constituents piled into one flat directory.

That was my motivation for subtex.py. It's a simple Python script that will, given the main latex file path, recursively work through all the files it depends on, copy them into a submit directory and update all the paths.

For example, if, in the example above, ms.tex is the main latex file. Using subtex.py will give you:

bib/
    references.bib
ms/
    ms-discussion.tex
    ms-figures.tex
    ms-intro.tex
    ms-results.tex
    ms-tables.tex
    ms.tex
    submit/
        fig1.pdf
        fig2.pdf
        macros.tex
        ms-discussion.tex
        ms-figures.tex
        ms-intro.tex
        ms-results.tex
        ms-tables.tex
        ms.tex
        preamble.tex
        references.bib
utils/
    macros.tex
    preamble.tex
images/
    fig1.pdf
    fig2.pdf

All of your original files are untouched, and submit is a self-contained subdirectory with all the necessary files with updated paths to build your document.

That is the basic idea. I wrote the script for my latex-submission needs in mind, and the script might not work "out of the box" for you. However, it should be relatively easy to tweak if it does not.

Requirements

Python is the only requirement. The script has only been tested version version 2.7 of Python.

Installation

Open a terminal window and navigate to where you would like to put the subtex repository. Then, use git to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/joaks1/subtex.git

Move into the subtex directory:

cd subtex

Call up the subtex.py help menu:

./subtex.py -h

If you wish, you can copy subtex.py to a location in your PATH.

Documentation

The basic usage is

subtex.py manuscript.tex

where manuscript.tex is the main latex file used to compile the document.

Acknowledgements

This software benefited from funding provided to Jamie Oaks from the National Science Foundation (DEB 1011423 and DBI 1308885).

License

Copyright (C) 2013 Jamie Oaks

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

See "LICENSE.txt" for full terms and conditions of usage.