Some academic journals require all subfigures to be combined as one single file for submission. This may not be easy to do if you don’t have a professional software (often proprietary) to edit vector maps, e.g., EPS and PDF.
I found a convenient way to deal with in LaTeX Beamer. The idea is to create a
beamer slide and insert your subfigures with the command \includegraphics{}
in the same figure environment. This beamer slide will then be the combined
figure.
Suppose the figure you want to create has two panels, (A) and (B). A simple example would be
\documentclass[10pt]{beamer}
\geometry{papersize={8in, 6in}} % slide size
\setbeamersize{text margin left=0.1in, text margin right=0.1in}
\mode<presentation>
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{} % disable the navigation bar
\begin{document}
\title{} % no title
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{} % no frame title
\begin{figure}[h]
\includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{fig_1a.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{fig_1b.pdf}
\end{figure}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
Some extra efforts may be needed to adjust the figure to a desirable layout, but hopefully it will be less laborious than redrawing the figure or editing it with an image processing software.
