On Sun, Jun 29, 2025 at 09:12:41PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote: > On Sun, Jun 29, 2025 at 06:53:20PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote: > > > title verso page for TeX output (and possibly LaTeX output with texi2any). > > > I don't think it's advisable to try and make it automatic. Sometimes > > > users > > > might not want a title page, or might not quite follow the strucutre of > > > the > > > document that we expect them to. @maketitle and @copyrightpage would be > > > ignored in nearly all output formats with texi2any but users would have to > > > give them anyway if they wanted such pages for printed output. > > > > That is not really what I had in mind, even if it is already an > > improvement over the current situation. > > > > My idea was that the commands triggering output (@maketitle, > > @makecopyrightpage...) would always be rendered unless in output > > specific conditionals. The idea what that we would try to make them > > unneeded, that using information provided in environments that are not > > directly output (@copyrightpage, @documentinfo) would be enough and used > > by the processors based on the output format to automatically do the > > title page, if needed by the format. > > How could we distinguish among output with @titlepage, output with > @shorttittlepage, output with both, and output with neither?
I think that I was wrong in saying that we would try to make the commands unneeded, my point should have only been about interpreting similarly @-commands across different output formats as far as possible. The commands could be unneeded in some cases, but not always. It can be argued that the @makecopyrightpage/@copyrightpage are specific of books, but it has always annoyed me that title page, be it @shorttittlepage or the new @maketitle was considered to be TeX and LaTeX specific while it could be relevant for more formats. It is not relevant for Info, nor for HTML in the general case (but there are exceptions such as EPUB, ). It could be used for Plaintext. But this is not really what you said, so it is ok. > There are also @contents and @shortcontents, do you want to insert > them automatically as well? If so, how would we tell whether to output > the short contents or not? No, but I would like to have similar meaning conveyed by @contents and @shortcontents in the different output formats. > It seems to me that document authors make a choice as to which > of these elements they want to include at the beginning of their > output, and in which order, and different authors make different > choices. It may not be possible to automatically do the right > thing in all contexts. Agreed. > If the user gives "@documentinfo", it is probably safe to make > the title page at least, if not the short title page. Agreed. > We'd have to trigger the title page output in texinfo.tex by some > early command, such as "@contents" or "@node Top". Well, I actually agree that needing an explicit @maketitle for texinfo.tex or LaTeX output to have a title page output is probably better. My point is rather that it should apply to other output formats when a title page makes sense. I think that we probably agree at this point. -- Pat
