This is a requirement, for example, if one is preparing the proceedings of a conference whose papers were submitted in LaTeX.
The nearest thing to a canned solution is Peter Wilson's
combine class; it defines the means to '\import
' entire
documents, and provides means of specifying significant features of
the layout of the document, as well as a global table of contents, and
so on. An auxiliary package, combinet, allows use of the
\title
s and \author
s (etc.) of the \import
ed documents
to appear in the global table of contents.
A more 'raw' toolkit is offered by Matt Swift's includex and moredefs packages, both part of the frankenstein bundle) offer a possible way forward.
Includex enables you to '\includedoc
' complete articles
(in the way that you '\include
' chapter files in an ordinary
report). It doesn't do the whole job for you, though. You need to
analyse the package use of the individual papers, and ensure that a
consistent set is loaded in the preamble of the main report.
A completely different approach is to use the pdfpages
package, and to include articles submitted in PDF format into a
a PDF document produced by PDFLaTeX. The package
defines an \includepdf
command, which takes arguments similar to
those of the \includegraphics
command. With keywords in the
optional argument of the command, you can specify which pages you want
to be included from the file named, and various details of the layout
of the included pages.