Re: [Docutils-develop] biblio. fields in latex writer

[Beni C. <cb...@us...>]

Beni Cherniavsky wrote on 2003-09-10:

> I believe the only sensible way is to make our own titlepage with it.
> For document classes other than report and book, the `titlepage` env
> should be omitted and the same(?) output should be generated on the
> same page (are there other differences between the styles?).  I'll now
> try to look at the latex sources for the default title pages...
>
They have some frightening code (as expected ;), mostly because:

1. All(?) classes support making a separate title page or putting it
   at the top of the first page (default depends on class but you can
   override with the ``titlepage``/``notitlepage`` options).  However
   only `article` and `report` actually implement ``\maketitle`` and
   they seem to implement it in the same way...

2. They support bogus ``\and`` instead of ``\\`` and ``\thanks``
   instead of ``\footnote`` which we don't need.  Removing this cruft,
   our titlepage would not be so complex.  I can rip most of it from
   the LaTeX sources to preserve look-and-feel.

I think that we should keep the look-and-feel of LaTeX's titlepages,
with authors and date without any "Author:" and "Date:" prefixes and
with other bib. fields in smaller font (but bigger than in
document) after some vertical space, with field names but not in bold
(otherwise they would draw too much attention from the titlepage).

What do you think?

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cb...@us...>

P.S. is allowing comma/semicolon-separated authors so useful?  Why
can't we have a bullet list as the only, unambiguous,
language-indendent, way to specify multiple authors?  It certainly
feels like cruft, the rules for checking first ';' and then ',' (and
these are language-dependant, which is not even mentioned in the spec)
are so complex to even remember...