[Tex/LaTex] Preparing an abstracts book for a session

abstractindexing

I have a list of contributions for a conference, with each one consisting of a serial number, a title, a list of authors, and an abstract. What I'd like to do is:

  • typeset the list of contributions sequentially, so a reader can skim the abstracts
  • have an author index, so that the reader looking for the contribution of a particular author can jump directly to that page.

I have enough contributions, and expect enough changes, that automating this is worth my while.

Is there a standard package that I can adapt to do this ? I don't mind writing some external scripts to preprocess data if need be.

Note: there's no scheduling information I need to worry about.

Best Answer

There is no package that I know of, however it would not be too difficult to describe your own macros to first typeset an abstract, title and other similar information you want to capture. For example the abstract is defined as a list:

\newenvironment{absquote}
                   {{\center\bfseries Abstract\endcenter}%
                     \list{}{\leftmargin2cm\rightmargin\leftmargin}%
                    \item\relax\footnotesize}
                   {\endlist}

A full minimal is shown below:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\newenvironment{absquote}
               {{\center\bfseries Abstract\endcenter}%
                 \list{}{\leftmargin2cm\rightmargin\leftmargin}%
                \item\relax\footnotesize}
               {\endlist}
\def\author#1{\center#1\endcenter}
\def\articletitle#1{\center{\bfseries\LARGE{#1}}\endcenter}
\def\serial#1{{\bfseries\hfill#1\hspace{1em}}}
\begin{document}
\articletitle{Some wonderful article}
\author{Yiannis Lazarides}
\begin{absquote}
\lipsum[1]
\serial{A-213}
\end{absquote}
\end{document}

enter image description here

To import all the abstracts you can use input{} within a loop to loop over all the numbers. If they are not too many you might even do it manually to give you more control and to add meta comments.

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