X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil]
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Date:         Fri, 22 Jun 90 21:27:00 PDT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet>
Subject:      Re: Front matter
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 135

>Don Hosek suggested a new way of specifying front matter
>elements.
>In my opinion, this is NOT the direction things should go: the
>old
>way of specifying front matter elements is still the best way, I
>think,
>but more elements need to be added. Before this discussion list
>started
>I sent Frank a list of the commands that are implemented by the
>styles
>for Elsevier's scientific journals. For that application I added
>\address, \received and \keyword commands to the existing
>\title, \author
>and \date.

The reason I proposed the format I did was it seemed to me the
easiest way for a document style to handle any front matter
specifications it did not recognize. The possible specifications
is really rather limitless. I think that the Platonic ideal of
LaTeX is that any document prepared under the, say, "article"
idiom for markup should be capable of being formatted with any
article variant without any modifications beyond \documentstyle.
In certain cases additional changes may need to be made in the
preamble, but this should be fairly rare (the case of causing all
tabulars to be printed flush left rather than centered, for
example).

My scheme has the advantage that it is fairly simple to
implement:

\def\topm#1{\ifnextchar[{\@otopm#1}{\@topm#1}}
\def\@topm#1#2{\@namedef{@#1}{#2}}
\def\@otopm#1[#2]#3{\@namedef{@short#1}{#2}
  \@namedef{@#1}{#3}}

and is backwards compatible (I haven't seen a style which has,
e.g., \address define anything other than \@address for example.

Actually the scheme above is lacking one feature that I think it
should have which is repeatability of topmatter (I really like
Barbara's name for it) specifications. E.g.,

\topm{author}{Fred Schwartz}
\topm{author}{Joe Fish}
\topm{revised}{12-Jan-1968}
\topm{revised}{12-Feb-1968}
\topm{revised}{23-Jun-1977}

should define

\@author == Fred Schwartz
\@author1 == Joe Fish
\@revised == 12-Jan-1968
\@revised1 == 12-Feb-1968
\@revised2 == 23-Jun-1977

This would not be too much more difficult to implement but since
I'm dealing with a 100+ message backlog right now, I'll leave the
implementation of the code to the reader (also left as an
exercise is the explanation of why numbering of additional
authors and other duplicated topmatter is only applied beginning
with the second occurrences and starts with one (this should be
easy).

-dh