PDFlatex when submitting to journal servers

If you are using PDFLaTeX for your paper, and want to submit it to EES servers of Elsevier (for Pattern Recognition or other journals), you need to put these 5 lines at the beginning of your LaTeX file:

%&pdflatex

\documentclass[review,preprint,12pt]{elsarticle}

% \biboptions{sort&compress} % natbib is loaded by default

\pdfoutput=1

\pdfoptionpdfminorversion=5%

The first line is commented but will be used. The third line can be uncommented, if you want the references be sorted according to their appearance in the paper.

And, it is important that these line do not go beyond the first-5 lines of the file.