ReLaTeX Command-line Options

ReLaTeX requires two command-line arguments:

relatex.py TEMPLATE INPUT-PATH [OPTIONS]

• template: This should be either
  • the name of a directory inside the relatex/templates directory, e.g. plos. This only works if you are running relatex.py directly from the relatex source directory.
  • the path to your desired template file, e.g. /path/to/templates/plos/template.tex. In this case, the name of the directory in which the file is located (plos) will be taken as the template name.
  • the path to your desired template directory, e.g. /path/to/templates/plos, which must contain a templates.tex template file.
• input latex file path: path to the LaTeX file to read.

Note: by default ReLaTeX writes its output latex file to the current directory, with the template name appended to its file prefix, i.e. running the pnas template on a test.tex input file will generate a test_pnas.tex output file.

Note that ReLaTeX also looks for an affiliations.txt affiliations file in the current directory. For more info see Specifying Institutional Affiliations and Authorship Roles.

In addition, it accepts the following options:

• --extract-tables: some templates (e.g. PLOS) require moving all the tables to the end of the paper. Using this option extract all tables from the main text, and allows the template to insert them at the end of the paper.
• --extract-figures: some templates (e.g. PLOS) require moving all the figures to the end of the paper. Using this option extract all figures from the main text, and allows the template to insert them at the end of the paper.
• --bbl BBL-PATH: some templates (e.g. PNAS) require directly inserting the bibliography into the latex file (rather than providing a separate .bib bibliography database). ReLaTeX will do this automatically for you if you provide the path to a .bbl file for your input paper (this is generated automatically when you run bibtex on your input paper).
• --title "My Amazing Paper Title": override the default title searching mechanism (which looks for \title{...}) by explicitly providing the paper title.
• --authors "Adam Smith,Karl Marx,Charles Darwin": override the default author searching mechanism (which looks for \author{...}) by explicitly providing the paper authors as a comma-separated string.
• --email ADDRESS: provide an email address for the corresponding author, used by some templates.
• --no-extra-files: by default, ReLaTeX copies additional files required by your template (e.g. .cls and .sty files) into the directory containing your output file, since running latex on the output latex file will require these files. You can turn off this behavior with this flag.
• --no-subsection-numbers: some templates (e.g. PLoS) require that section numbering be turned off for subsections. You can do so using this flag.
• --rename OLDNAME:NEWNAME: you can rename one or more sections in your original document to the names expected by the journal, by specifying a current section name as OLDNAME, and the name expected by the journal as NEWNAME.
• --imageoptions IMAGEOPTIONS: forces \includegraphics to use IMAGEOPTIONS as its optional arguments, i.e. in the form \includegraphics[IMAGEOPTIONS].
• --merge-citations TAG: merges any string of \cite{CITE1} \cite{CITE2}... to be combined in a single expression of the form TAG{CITE1,CITE2...}.
• --keep-hrefs: forces relatex to preserve \href{} links; by default it strips them, since many journal templates do not allow them.
• --replace :PATTERN:SUB: perform global substitution of the regular expression PATTERN to replace it with the regular expression SUB; you can use subgroup values in SUB such as \1,\2 etc. Note that you can specify any separator character you want as the first character of the argument string; in the example above it is given as : (i.e. a colon).
• --param KEY=VALUE: pass the specified keyword arguments to the Jinja2 template, to use as it desires.

An example:

python /path/to/relatex.py bioinformatics mypaper.tex --email leec@chem.ucla.edu --merge-citations '\citep' --keep-hrefs --imgoptions 'width=9cm' --replace ':\\cite\{:\citep{' --replace ':\\code\{([^}]+)\}:\1' --param shortTitle=Phenoseq --param fundingText='DOE grant DE-FC02-02ER63421' --param shortAuthors='Lee \& Harper'