Generally, papers are written to be published at conferences or journals. While some journals care about the LaTeX source used to compile the submitted papers, most venues just expect compiled PDFs to be submitted. However, ArXiv always requires the full LaTeX source to be compiled on the ArXiv servers. As the LaTeX source of every ArXiv paper can be downloaded, this usually involves removing all comments, unused figures/files and “flattening” the directoy structure as ArXiv does not handle subdirectories well. In this article, I want to share two simple scripts that take care of the latter two problems: removing unused files and flattening.