4

A report, or a book, has a cover page and a title page, but the typical templates and LaTeX solutions in general seem to ignore the cover page. I can't figure if this is just not enough developed or for some reason intentional.

As far as I can tell, I can have a \begin{titlepage} \end{titlepage} that expands over multiple pages and thus having both a cover page and a titlepage, but is this the way to go?

One other option might be to create a separate document and include it in the main one as pdf, but what implications does this have?

A third option would be to render a pdf cover page, and then render as pdf the rest of the document and merge them using a 3rd party tool, but this doesn't sound good to me, since I have no control over what any 3rd party tool does and I can only do a visual check.

A fourth option is to just render the two pdfs separately and merge them together only after they are printed on actual paper.

I think the fourth makes the most sense, because I suppose in a typography the cover page goes to a different "printer", but unfortunately I am writing my thesis and the Word template the university provides includes a cover page, therefore I'll have to provide a pdf that has a cover page.

What is the recommended, well-established way of dealing with cover pages?

Mensch
  • 65,388
Andrei
  • 295
  • 2
    I'm not sure what a `cover page' is. I would guess that it is what goes on the cover of a book and consists of the front, spine, and back of whatever is used to finally cover the bound text block (which will include the title page). In order to design such a cover page you would need to know the final thickness of the text block (for the spine area) and the kind of binding (e.g., paperback, bookcloth, leather). In any case I would suggest doing a seperate cover page pdf. – Peter Wilson Jul 30 '15 at 18:05
  • A cover is what you see beore opening the book, the outside. A cover page and a title page are often confused. I have written down some notes -> https://github.com/johannesbottcher/titlepageExamples – Johannes_B Jul 30 '15 at 18:56
  • The term `cover page' sounds like what is done with Dutch PhD theses: there one typically has (dictated by university rules) first a page containing only the title, then a page with copyright, ISBN and other info, and then a formal titlepage with title (+ translation in Dutch), author and date and time of the defense. The first title page is called the "cover page" if I recall correctly. – Jaap Eldering Jul 30 '15 at 19:33
  • Bingo, Dutch university. @Johannes_B , they might be often confused, but I really meant cover page, not title page – Andrei Jul 30 '15 at 19:40
  • The Dutch term is actually "schutblad" and it seems the English translation would be fly leaves or "half title" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_design#Front_matter – Jaap Eldering Jul 30 '15 at 19:47
  • 1
    @eldering Naming confusion, technically still a titlepage. In german, this is called "Schmutztitel". The KOMA-documentation has a lot of useful comments on titlepages and their creation. The half-title can be done using KOMA-script with the command \extratitle. KOMA-script also provides commands to set a cover and set different margins for the cover. – Johannes_B Jul 30 '15 at 19:48
  • 1
    If you are using a KOMA class, @Johannes_B's suggestion is great. If you are using a standard class, I'd recommend use of titling. Then you can have multiple titlepages and/or titlingpages etc. You can also reuse information usually lost in creating the title (e.g. title, author, date for use in copyright declarations or headers/footers etc.). – cfr Jul 31 '15 at 00:34

0 Answers0