Best practices for publishing computer code with LaTeX?

Question

I work a lot with MATLAB, and I want to enable the reader of my paper to easily reproduce my computations. I also want the pdf document to be self-contained, i.e., no hyperlinks to a webpage on which the code is available. Is there a good way to accomplish this in LaTeX?

Unfortunately, I find that authors frequently print their computer code in the paper, and the code might be broken over multiple pages, thereby making copy-and-paste a tedious task.

I envision two alternatives:

1. In the pdf, there is a link that when clicked, prompts the user to save an m file in a directory of his choosing. I do not want the m file to reside in a local network drive (as in this question), but rather, I want the m file code to somehow reside under the hood of the pdf (much like how the pdf includes graphics, say).

2. In the pdf, there is a text box with a scroll bar which contains my MATLAB code. If interested, the reader can easily copy and paste as desired.

I would be very happy to learn how to implement either of these (or other alternatives) in LaTeX. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

The PDF format includes file attachments, which means other files can be attached much like in emails.

One package that can do this is the attachfile package. This package inserts a link to the attached file in the document text.

My preferred package is navigator. Navigator simply attaches the file; nothing appears in the document. The file is accessed using the attachments window in the PDF viewer.

The navigator command for attaching a file is

\embeddedfile[<description>]{<object name>}[<alternate filename>]{<file>}

where the file <file> is attached to the document under the name <file> (or <alternate filename> if present) and with the description <description>. The <object name> is an internal name for the attached file and is invisible to the reader of the document.

Answer 2

This uses the attachfile2 package (the attached file is just the ordinary hello world example in C (ok, it's not Matlab ;-))

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[pdfversion=1.7]{hyperref}
\usepackage{attachfile2}



\begin{document}
This is the famous Hello World example: \attachfile[color=0 1 0,description={The famous Hello World example}]{helloworld.c}

\end{document}

%%%

% Example helloworld.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc,char **argv)
{
  printf("Hello World!\n");
  return(0);
}

Edit The attachfile2 is a follow-up package of attachfile. There are some keys to the \attachfile command, which are described in the documentation of attachfile.

Answer 3

Regarding the second alternative, check out listings package.

Answer 4

The listings package allows the inclusion (and syntactic highlighting) of code.

The code either comes from a file, like

\lstinputlisting[frame=single,language=C++,numbers=left]{myfile.cc}

Here, decorated with a frame and line numbering. Or is directly written in the LaTeX source :

\begin{lstlisting}
    cout << "hello, world"
         << endl;
\end{lstlisting}

The Matlab language is supported (see also Using listing for displaying Matlab code).