correct environment/command for booktitles, names, etc

Question

What is "the correct" environment/command for booktitles, names, songtitles, names of movies or other papers?

Example Sentence:

Some ideas of that are also reviewed in \c1{Max Mox}'s interview with \c1{Arnold Fitzgerald}, who himself is author of the book \c2{The Book} which was later turned into a a film \c3{the film} by \c1{the filmer}.

In other situations I would use quotation marks or italics. But I guess there are some commands which also catch the semantic aspct in that case instead of just using \textit or quotation marks. (Like in html to semantically label emphasis)

Book titles should (in most English texts, at least), be put in italics (or in Roman if embedded in an italic section); if you want a semantic definition, which is a good idea, you could make your own: \newcommand*{\btitle}[1]{\emph{#1}}. Song titles should be put in quotation marks, I believe (use the facilities of csquotes.sty); and I think film titles would be put in italics too, but I'd need to check. Names do not normally get special treatment, but you can still create name macros, which will be of great use if you end of needing to construct an idex later on. — jon, Sep 03 '13 at 17:33
In general: if you think you might be going to need an index, you are better off creating and using macros for all elements that might need to be indexed.... — jon, Sep 03 '13 at 17:35

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

If you cite articles or books etc. you could use BibLaTeX (BibLaTeX documentation) to create a bibliography for you. You can then easily refer to the author of one of the works you cited by \citeauthor{} and to the title by \citetitle{}, of course you can cite the work with \cite{}. BibLaTeX automatically formats the titles of books and articles according to conventional use, although you can change the formatting to meet your needs.

If you only care for a person database, there is nameauth (nameauth documentation) or a experimental concept with BibLaTeX (Create a register of persons with biblatex).

Of course you could also simply define your own commands like

\newcommand*{\nameperson}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\newcommand*{\fnameperson}[2]{#1 \textsc{#2}}
\newcommand*{\booktitle}[1]{\emph{#1}}
\newcommand*{\filmtitle}[1]{\enquote{#1}}

If there is a particular name you want to refer to quite often, you could also define a macro for that

\newcommand{\Lewis}{\textsc{Lewis}}
\newcommand{\DLewis}{David \textsc{Lewis}}

Note that \enquote is a command provided by csquotes.

What you should use really depends on your needs. Based on your example, I think BibLaTeX is worth a look, and if you additionally have a lot of names in your document - that you want markup for - nameauth is also worth considering.

correct environment/command for booktitles, names, etc

1 Answers1