The use case for this tool is: your paper has been accepted at a conference, and now you have to submit the latex sources for inclusion in the proceedings.

But - your sources contain some information that you don't want to reveal. E.g., it contains \todo{fix proof of previous theorem}.

flat-tex does the following:

• flatten a multi-file latex document (recursively expanding all \input and \bibliography)
• remove all \todo{..}, \reminder{..} and comments (% ...)

How \input{foo} is expanded:

• if the file foo does exist, then it is processed
• else foo.tex is processed

How \bibliography{...}is expanded:

• the file top.bbl is processed, where top.tex is the file that contains the \bibliography statement