flatex.py

This "flattens" a LaTeX document by replacing all \input{X} lines with the text actually contained in X. It uses the click module to create a command line interface.

Two new options are available:

• Specify a .tex subfolder for input files similarly to what the input@path command does in the main file
• Launch an interactive session to allow the user to select only specific sections to import

It was inspired by this discussion on Stack Overflow. There are C and perl versions of this, but I wanted a pure python version to fit in with my existing paper-creating toolchain.

To install

git clone https://github.com/johnjosephhorton/flatex.git
cd flatex
pip install --editable . 

Usage

As a stand-alone script:

flatex inputfile.tex outputfile.tex

If you want to include the bbl file as well:

flatex --include_bbl inputfile.tex outputfile.tex

If you want to specify a .tex subfolder:

flatex inputfile.tex outputfile.tex --tex_folder folder_name

If you want to select only specific input files to expand:

flatex inputfile.tex outputfile.tex --interactive

Limitations:

1. It does also recognize \includes commands, but this has not been tested.
2. Tested for nested inputs, although not extensively (only two levels deep).
3. Tested for file living in subdirectories, only one level deep.
4. The test case writes to the /tmp folder - so the test probably wouldn't work on Windows(?).

Copyright, 2015, John J. Horton (john.joseph.horton@gmail.com) Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt for details.