[Tex/LaTex] Formatting and alignment of authors in \maketitle

templatestitles

I am in the process of creating a LaTeX template for a conference submission, and up until now I've been working only with the anonymous submissions. Now I need to create the "camera-ready" version, which means I need to add authors to the document.

The template is based on article.cls, with some tweaks to meet the font and formatting specifications. The following image contains the examples from the Word template for the conference:

Author formatting requirements

Basically, I need to be able to bold the author's name (which could I suppose be done manually in the document rather than in the template) and more importantly: divide the authors into two columns, with an optional centered last column with an odd number of authors. The font size of the author block corresponds to my \LARGE defined in the class file.

Are there any packages that facilitate this type of conditional formatting, either in a document, or in a .cls file? How can I use those packages to achieve the formatting I require?

Best Answer

Better late than never.

Redefining a bit of stuff should get you what you want.

RyanAuthorsThree

RyanAuthorsFour

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{titling}
\usepackage{array}
\preauthor{\begin{center}
    \large \lineskip .75em%
        \begin{tabular}[t]{>{\centering\arraybackslash}p{.45\textwidth}}}
        \postauthor{\end{tabular}\par\end{center}}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\and{%                  % \begin{tabular}
  \end{tabular}%
  \hfill
  \begin{tabular}[t]{>{\centering\arraybackslash}p{.45\textwidth}}}%   % \end{tabular}
  \makeatother
\begin{document}
\title{This is a story of great friends}
\author{Wombat \\ Australia \and
    Capybara \\ Brasil \and
    Mara \\ Patagonia \and
Nasenb\"ar \\ M\"onchengladbach}
\maketitle
\blindtext
\end{document}
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