Splitting body and references in Latex for NSF proposals

For those of us who prepare grant proposals for the NSF, and use LaTeX for formatting, it can be a pain to separate the body of the proposal from the references, as the two have to be uploaded separately. A combination of pdftk (the PDF toolkit) and make handles this in a pretty straightforward fashion:

1. put the following in your LaTeX source, just before generating the bibliography, to mark the last page:

\label{page:last}

2. Use a makefile that looks like this (assuming you use pdflatex):

FILE = proposal
$(FILE).pdf: $(FILE).tex
    pdflatex $(FILE)
    bibtex $(FILE)
    pdflatex $(FILE)
    pdflatex $(FILE)

DESC_END = $(shell grep page:last $(FILE).aux | tr '{}' ' ' | awk '{print $$NF}')
REFS_START = $(shell expr $(DESC_END) + 1)

description.pdf: $(FILE).pdf
        pdftk $< cat 1-$(DESC_END) output $@

references.pdf: $(FILE).pdf
        pdftk $< cat $(REFS_START)-end output $@