How do I [simply] typeset a bibliography as a separate PDF?

Question

I'm preparing a document that requires the body of the text and the references to be separate PDF files. Of course, the bibliography comes from \bibliograpy command and the text citations come from \cite command.. you need both to be present in order for BibTeX to work.

I have been typesetting the document and then breaking it apart with pdftk(1) -- but that is annoying and requires me to know page numbering. Is there a TeX-only way to do it?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you want, but if you have foo.bbl from running BibTeX, then you can make a simple document which typesets just the bibliography.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\input{foo.bbl}
\end{document}

To have the bibliography not appear in your main document, use the following.

\usepackage{comment}
\excludecomment{thebibliography}

Edit:
This is wrong. (I'd completely forgotten that I'd given this answer.) As is noted in the comments, doing this breaks things. A friend asked me how to do this just the other day and the solution I gave her is better, but I'm not sure that it's the best way.

{\setbox0\vbox{\bibliography{foo}}}

This typesets the bibliography in a vertical box and stores it in box register 0. Then the group ends and box 0 is restored.

Answer 2

I actually like the other solution better (and have so voted), but if you wanted to stick with pdftk, one option would be to use synctex to determine on what page the bibliography started, set that to a variable which is then passed to pdftk.

On linux or unix (probably) mac, e.g., you might use a script like this:

#!/bin/bash

# first, process the file
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 myfile.tex 
bibtex myfile
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 myfile.tex
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 myfile.tex
# now check where the bibliography starts
bibpage=$(synctex view -i 1:1:"myfile.bbl" -o "myfile.pdf" | grep -m1 'Page:' | sed 's/Page://')
# now call pdftk to break it apart
pdftk A=myfile.pdf cat A1-$((endpage - 1)) output myfile-body.pdf
pdftk A=myfile.pdf cat A${bibpage}-end output myfile-bibliography.pdf

or something of that nature.