dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) (06/04/90)
Hello. I have noticed some slight dissimilarities between the LaTeX
book document style, and the sort of layout one often sees in a book.
Most notably, book.sty seems to have no built-in support for a preface.
I have kludged around the problem almost satisfactorily now, but I have
a couple of remaining questions. First, what I did. After the document
preamble, I generate my preliminaries:
\begin{document}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\tableofcontents
\listoffigures
\listoftables
Then, I command the following, to generate a big, bold "Preface"
on a right-hand page, along with the table-of-contents entry. I
have to set the pagestyle to "plain", so I don't get a page header
with a "List of Tables" line at the top.
\cleardoublepage
\pagestyle{plain}
{\huge\bf Preface }
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Preface}
\noindent Hello. this is some fake text to test the preface.
Then, I switch the pagestyle back to normal for the start of the
first chapter:
\chapter{Introduction}
\pagestyle{headings}
\pagenumbering{arabic}
...and then we are off into book-land. Now the problems I am having
are thus:
1. The second page of the preface (you don't see one here, but the
book will have one) retains the "plain" pagestyle. I would like to
have the normal "headings" pagestyle on the second page, but I
haven't figured out how to kill the "List of Tables" heading. This
pops up because LaTeX hasn't gotten another sectioning command yet,
so it still thinks we are in the List of Tables. I looked at
the "myheadings" pagestyle in the LaTeX manual and found this a wee
bit opaque. I would guess that the name of the current section is
landing up in a variable which gets printed out, and I might be
able to reset this variable to a blank or null string?
2. The vertical spacings between the top of the page and the big, bold
"Preface", and between "Preface" and the first line of text, are not
the same as they are in the Table of Contents, List of Tables, and
List of Figures. In Leslie Lamport's LaTeX book, he has the same
spacing. I puttered around in book.sty and latex.tex for a while, and
I couldn't figure out right away exactly how much vertical space is
winding up in those environments. I could resort to brute force
(i.e., print out a bunch of pages and measure with a ruler), but I
thought I would ask the net first.
Thanks for your assistance.
--
Dan Mocsny Snail:
Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati
513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171