LaTeX macro expander

If you just want to see how LaTeX works, and what it does when macros are expanded, you can put \tracingmacros or \tracingall in your .tex file, and LaTeX will write the expansion process in the log file.

Solution for me was http://ctan.org/pkg/de-macro, it is included with TeX Live, then if you are using a Debian based linux distribution it is likely you already have it

what you have to do is:

• place your definitions in a file called something like something-private.sty, in the same directory your original file yourfile.tex is located
• comment or remove your definitions in yourfile.tex
• place a command \usepackage{something-private} in yourfile.tex
• open a shell, and go to the directory where yourfile.tex is located
• in the shell execute de-macro yourfile.tex

a yourfile-clean.tex will be created with the desired macros expanded, if you need to change something in your definitions then remove the *-clean.tex files and run de-macro again.

I'm not aware of a package to do this, but I'd love to have one. The cleveref package has an option along these lines:

When the poorman option is supplied, your document will be processed as normal. But in addition, a sed script will automatically be written, containing rules for replacing all the \cref commands with the LaTeX code that they would produce, and using the standard \ref command to produce the cross-references themselves.

In the package I imagine for LaTeX, you'd have a command such as \newmacro that behaved along the same lines, which would behave like \newcommand except the author would ensure that only "sane" expansions would occur. It could then write an auxiliary file that uses a Lua script to generate a copy of the document with all the macros replaced by their definitions.

So, er, anyone willing to write it?