Preparing an abstracts book for a session

Question

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.

How do the serial numbers look? can you please give an example? — yannisl, Apr 14 '12 at 06:14
It's as simple as 1 - This is the title - First Last, First Last and First Last. — Suresh, Apr 14 '12 at 06:28
@ThorstenDonig: That's very helpful as well. A little overwhelming at first, but I'll go through it :) — Suresh, Apr 14 '12 at 17:44
Related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/45461/is-there-a-latex-package-for-conference-event-programs — Zev Chonoles, Apr 18 '12 at 02:46

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 14 '12 at 06:39

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.

This is nice: but what does it mean to use input{} to loop over numbers ? — Suresh, Apr 14 '12 at 17:40
@YiannisLazarides Thanks for your help. But how do I add multiple authors and their individual affiliations? — Subhajit Paul, Feb 22 '19 at 19:43

Preparing an abstracts book for a session

1 Answers1