X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil]
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Date:         Fri, 8 Jun 90 12:10:00 PDT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet>
Subject:      Front matter definitions
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 122

One thing that has always been a thorn in my side when teaching LaTeX has been
that different journals/publishers/etc. require additional items of frontmatter
to be defined in the title and elsewhere;

For example, a documentstyle which produces fiction typescripts would require
the following information:
\title (optional argument to be used if the title will appear in page headers)
\author
\date
\lastname
\wordcount
\copyrightnotice
\rights
\address
\phone
\ssn

TUGboat calls for

\title
\author
\address
\netaddress
And optionally \signature

A thesis style might call for

\title
\author
\date
\degree
\reader
\begin{acknowledgements}...

How to handle all of these? I propose

\frontm{<name>}[<optional info>]{required}

E.g., in the typescript example above, rather than typing
\author{J.D. Salinger}
\lastname{Salinger}

One could simply type

\frontm{author}[Salinger]{J.D. Salinger}

which would call \author[Salinger]{J.D. Salinger} if that command existed (other

styles might

The article style (and most others) would simply ignore the optional argument.
The typescript style would take the two arguments and deine \@shortauthor to
be "Salinger" (or it would be "J.D. Salinger" if the optional argument was
missing) and \@author to be "J.D. Salinger". (The optional argument should
_always_ be the short form.)

We might also have
\frontm{netaddress}[Bitnet:]{jds@catcher}
\frontm{wordcount}{Approx.\ 20,000 words}

The article style would ignore both of these declarations, the typescript style
would ignore only netaddress, TUGboat would ignore wordcount.

Any document style would set up appropriate defaults for all front matter
definitions that it needs (the only front matter definitions that should be
_required_ for the document to run are author and title) and ignore any front
matter declarations it doesn't need.

We'd also have, using Frank's attribute syntax (which despite the impression
Frank seemed to have gotten, I _do_ like--assuming some minor adjustments:

\begin{frontmat|shortform="Salinger"}{author}
J.D. Salinger
\end{frontmat}

(the only people who would use this would be the ones who also type
\begin{displaymath} and \begin{bf}bold\end{bf})

And we'd also have

\begin{frontmatter}{acknowledgements}
blah blah blah.
\end{frontmatter}

The exact syntax isn't fixed, but the above shouldn't be too difficult to
implement (I'll probably do it tonight or next week for the style files class).

The other nice part is that it retains a degree of backwards and forwards
compatibility.

-dh