How to combine article *.tex files into a book *.tex?

Question

I am currently working on a book that collects several finished standalone *.tex articles. Each article has its own title, abstract, sections, etc. So simply using \include will unfortunately not work (e.g. because of multiple \title{} and \abstract{} blocks in the resulting document). The book itself has some additional material such as a preface, a title page and a table of contents. What I would like to achieve is a unified styling across the entire material (e.g. all single column), consistent page numbering and a unified bibliography at the very end, if possible. Simply concatenating the output PDFs is therefore also not an option.

How would you do this? I would like to avoid too much manual intervention in the original *.tex files, if possible.

Answer 1

Warning: I'm the author of combine.

I think that you could do it using combine with a little work on your part. For combine everything must be of the same class but from what you said you want to use a bunch of article within a book. A main difference between these is that book provides \chapter while article does not. If you used article throughout while faking an equivalent to \chapter in the few instances you might need it could work with little trouble but beware of book's \frontmatter, \mainmatter and \backmatter commands if you were inclined to use them (perhaps replicate them in the context of the main article if necessary).