[texhax] General Advice on Combining Documents for a Thesis

[Thomas Jacobs]

Reinhard,

First off, thanks so much for the detailed reply.  I need to submit
electronically but there is no requirement that hyperlinks be embedded
and to date I have written my papers with \url commands.  While I
would like to use hyperlinks at some point and have yet to master it,
I need not get it working for the dissertation.

I have not used acrobat to merge multiple documents with consecutive
page numbers so I am unsure how challenging that will be.

I am unable to use the appendix approach you suggest since the order
must be as I described, with the Thesis conclusion following the
papers as my main chapters.  Does this preclude the table of contents
as you described in your recommended approach with appendices for the
papers?

So if I follow you, I would make a top level .tex file that would be a
section and just as I currently use input for tables and charts I
would input the documents I currently have a stand alone papers and
each would then have its own bibliography line enabling distinct
reference sections and it would properly label page numbers and I hope
create a table of contents?  You actually used \documentclass{report}
in your example.  Is this different from a section or the same thing?

Thanks again for your help.

Tom

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> On 28 May 2010 Thomas Jacobs wrote:
>
>  > I am a doctoral student in Finance where the practice is to write
>  > three papers (not necessarily related) and combine them into a thesis.
>  >  I have confirmed that combining them as follows is acceptable to the
>  > grad college:
>  >
>  > Thesis Title Page, Abstract, Table of Contents, Introduction
>  > Paper 1 Title Page, Abstract, Body, References, Tables, Figures
>  > Paper 2 Title Page, Abstract, Body, References, Tables, Figures
>  > Paper 3 Title Page, Abstract, Body, References, Tables, Figures
>  > Thesis Conclusion
>  >
>  > I have been unable to decipher how to do this in LaTeX, particularly
>  > as most web available code skeletons or guides assume a single set of
>  > references, etc.
>  >
>  > When I try to combine them in one TeX file I get errors if I have more
>  > than one document begin and end line and am uncertain how I would code
>  > the three distinct sets of references.
>  >
>  > Can anyone advise if this is possible or if I need to create five
>  > separate LaTeX projects and their resulting output .pdf files
>  > (manually handling the page numbers and thesis table of contents) and
>  > then use Acrobat to combine the five resulting files?  Thanks very
>  > much.
>
> The question is whether it's sufficient to provide a paper copy or you
> need a PDF file with intact hyperlinks.
>
> Combining the PDF files is possible, either using Acrobat or the
> pdfpages package.  Then you have to set the page counter at the
> beginning of each file manually.  This is quite easy and I even could
> send you a Perl script which combines all PDF files in a particular
> directory into a single PDF file.  The drawback is that hyperlinks get
> lost because they are not stored at the same place as the page
> contents within a PDF file.  Don't know whether Acrobat handles this
> better.  It's not trivial.
>
> The LaTeX solution is to move everything between \begin{document} and
> \end{document} to separate files.  The papers (Paper 1..3) should use
> \documentclass{article} because the top-level sectioning command is
> \section.
>
> Then you could write your thesis like this:
>
> --------------------------
> \documentclass{report}
>
> \begin{document}
> \chapter{foo}
> text...
>
> \chapter{bar}
> text...
>
> \chapter{foobar}
> text...
>
> \chapter{Paper 1}\include{paper1}
> \chapter{Paper 2}\include{paper2}
> \chapter{Paper 3}\include{paper3}
>
> \chapter{Conclusion}
> text...
> \end{document}
> --------------------------
>
>
> In order to compile a particular paper separately, you have to provide
> files like:
>
> --------------------------
> \documentclass{article}
>
> \begin{document}
> \include{paper1}
> \end{document}
> --------------------------
>
>
> BTW, I would move the papers to the appendix:
>
> --------------------------
> \documentclass{report}
>
> \begin{document}
> ...your thesis, several chapters...
>
> \chapter{Conclusion}
> ...conclusion...
>
> \appendix
>
> \chapter{Paper 1}\include{paper1}
> \chapter{Paper 2}\include{paper2}
> \chapter{Paper 3}\include{paper3}
> \end{document}
> --------------------------
>
> Then you get in the table of contents:
>
>  1 foo
>  2 bar
>  3 foobar
>  4 Conclusion
>  A Paper 1
>  B Paper 2
>  C Paper 3
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>



-- 
Thomas Jacobs