Following a suggestion by Resist1984 [1], it might be interesting at the pdf production stage to use the LaTeX package attachfile [2].

I think this could be interesting for some projects, although I'm not convinced that it's currently optimal for reproducibility and longevity.

The documentation [3] currently says that attachfile won't work with latex+dvips+ps2pdf, which is needed for working with postscript figure files, that are preferred by ArXiv [4] for longevity as a plain-text format.

I tried viewing the result of an input file such as

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{attachfile}
\begin{document}
\huge Demonstrate the use of {\tt attachfile}.
\attachfile{dummy.tex}
\end{document}

compiled with pdflatex .

'xpdf' doesn't supporting clicking on the attachment.

'evince' 3.22.1 shows a box and displays no content with \attachfile{dummy.tex}, but launches libreoffice with \attachfile{dummy.txt}. Launching different viewers for attachments is presumably a question of the OS, user configuration, and a bit of elementary hacking.

I think the idea is worth exploring, but currently removes one step of longevity (allowing postscript figure sources) and would require a bit of hacking for the 'attachment' to give the user options such as 'save to disk/find-file in emacs'.


[1] https://social.privacytools.io/@resist1984/106403512774826889

[2] https://ctan.org/pkg/attachfile?lang=en

[3] http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/attachfile/attachfile.pdf

[4] https://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex