\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. The
complete set of facilities is pretty complex. An auxiliary package,
combinet, allows use of the \titles and \authors
(etc.) of the \imported documents to appear in the global table
of contents. The basic structure of a combined document would be:
\documentclass[...]{combine}
...
\begin{document}
...
<introductory materiel>
...
\begin{papers}
% title and author of first article,
% to go the the main ToC
\coltoctitle{...}
\coltocauthor{...}
\label{art1}
\import{art1}
...
\end{papers}
...
<acknowledgements, etc.>
...
\end{document}
The subfiles class is used in the component files of a multi-file project, and the corresponding subfiles package is used in the master file; so the structure of the master file looks like:
\documentclass{<whatever>}
...
\usepackage{subfiles}
...
\begin{document}
...
\subfile{subfile_name}
...
\end{document}
while a subfile has the structure:
\documentclass[mainfile_name]{subfiles}
\begin{document}
...
\end{document}
Arrangements may be made so that the component files will be typeset using different page format, etc., parameters than those used when they are typeset as a part of the main file.
A more ‘raw’ toolkit is offered by Matt Swift’s includex and newclude packages, both part of the frankenstein bundle. Note that Matt believes includex is obsolete (though it continues to work for this author); furthermore, its replacement, newclude remains “in development”, as it has been since 1999. Both includex and newclude enable you to ‘\includedoc’ complete articles (in the way that you
‘\include’ chapter files in an ordinary report). The preamble
(everything up to \begin{document}), and everything after
\end{document}, is ignored by both packages. Thus the
packages don’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. (Both
packages require moredefs, which is also part of the bundle.)
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.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=multidoc