[Tex/LaTex] Splitting a document per chapter with preample for Latexian live preview

chapterslatexianpreamble

Currently, I have my main LaTeX document set up as follows:

\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage{mystyle}
\title{Mytitle} \author{Me} \date{}

\begin{document}
\pagestyle{plain}
\maketitle
\chapter{Introduction}
\input{chapters/chapter01}
\end{document}

While my chapters themselves contain no preamble, no begin/end document etc, just the contents of the chapter itself.

I use Latexian and really enjoy the live preview function in a split screen. I would like to write each individual chapter and use the live preview feature, however, I cannot compile/preview each chapter on its own without its own preamble, begin/end document etc.

Is there a way around this? It feels very clunky to have to switch back and forth between a window containing just my chapter and one containing the entire thesis. Similarly, it feels very clunky to have each chapter contain everything necessary to compile and then manually comment out the extra lines from every single chapter when I wish to compile them all together.

Best Answer

Convert your chapters in complete documents (with the same preample that the main document) and then go to CTAN to known about the topic subdoc: include complete documents in other documents. In particular, docmute or standalone packages is what your are looking for. It is a simple as add one of these packages to the preamble of the main document (there are many examples of use of both packages in this site, for example this answer.

I suggest also move rest of the preamble to a preamble.tex file and left in the main document only \input{preamble} and use only this command in the preambles of the child fles, because if you need change some change in the preambles, you only have to do once, avoiding mistakes.

Alternatively, as suggested in the other answer, you can also preview the main document with only a chapter, using \includeonly{...} in the preamble of the main document, but note that this command affect to \include commands, not to \input (see When should I use \input vs. \include?), so in your example, you should change \chapter{...}\input{...} by only \include{...} with \chapter{...} included in the child document.

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[Tex/LaTex] Compile separate document chapters into book w/o duplicate references

First, I think it is good style to consolidate similar preambles. If, e.g., the subfiles define macros for special symbols in their preambles, it would be a good idea to outsource all such definitions into, say, mysybols.sty, that then can be loaded by all subfiles, and easily consolidated into a main preamble.

Apart from that, you might be looking for the standalone package. This package has the possibility to execute preambles of subfiles, see example below. Note however, that conflicting definitions or package options in the sub-preambles can not be resolved. This leaves the problem of multiply defined labels. I propose a hack that makes those labels unique by prepending the chapter number. For that, the definition of \label and \ref are altered. If you use other cross-referencing macros that don't fall through to \label and \ref like \cref from the cleveref package, they have to be treated in the same way. Note that redefinition of \label and \ref comes after \begin{document} here to have those redefinitions even after hyperref changed them.

Here are two small subfiles, both defining a macro, and both using a label fig:1.

subfile1.tex is

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\newcommand{\foo}{first subfile}

\begin{document}
\section{First section of \foo}
\begin{figure}
  \caption{A figure of \foo}\label{fig:1}
\end{figure}
See Figure~\ref{fig:1}.
\end{document}

subfile2.tex is

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\newcommand{\baz}{second subfile}

\begin{document}
\section{First section of \baz}
\begin{figure}
  \caption{A figure of \baz}\label{fig:1}
\end{figure}
See Figure~\ref{fig:1}.
\end{document}

Now the main document:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage[subpreambles=true]{standalone}

\begin{document}
\let\oldlabel\label
\renewcommand{\label}[1]{\oldlabel{\thechapter:#1}}
\let\oldref\ref
\renewcommand{\ref}[1]{\oldref{\thechapter:#1}}
\tableofcontents
\chapter{First chapter including first subfile}
\input{subfile1}

\chapter{Second chapter including second subfile}
\input{subfile2}
\end{document}

If the sub-preambles are conflicting, and you really don't want to tidy that up, your best option is probably joining the pdf files with the pdfpages package, or even just pasting the pdf files together with a tool like pdfjoin. Note however, that with pdfpages you lose all hyperlinks from the sub-pdfs.

[Tex/LaTex] modular chapters of a dissertation

Use the import package.

Suppose I write a document describing how to make a banana milkshake. Separate the document into the header and the content:

/banana/bananaMilkshake.tex (pseudocode)

\documentclass{whatever}
\begin{document}
\input{bananaMilkshake-content.tex}
\end{document}

/banana/bananaMilkshake-content.tex

Whatever content you want.

Then, in your thesis, just \import* the content sections as needed:

/my_thesis_directory/thesis.tex

...
\usepackage{import}
\chapter{Milkshakes}
\import*{/banana/}{bananaMilkshake-content}

The nice thing about \import* is that you give a path to the file you want to use. Any \input commands or graphics inclusions in the imported files still work. You can also use \subimport if you want relative paths. The asterisk is there to prevent TeX from using files in the local directory which might have the same name as the thing you want to import. See the documentation linked above.

Cutting the document into header and content sections isn't really an "extra" step because you really should do this anyway. For example, I have my package imports and things like that in a common .tex file which is imported as needed (the one package I have to explicitly \usepackage is... the import package). You should have lines like \input{abstract.tex}, etc.

Now, if you want to do something like add external files as appendices with references to one another, it's trickier. See my recent post (complete with working example) about this.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Compile separate document chapters into book w/o duplicate references

[Tex/LaTex] modular chapters of a dissertation

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