I am trying to create a simple template for students to create a one page abstract. The idea is that they just define their title, author, and abstract, and another file could actually have the main code that uses them. For example:
\title{A Very Simple \LaTeXe{} Template} \author{author1 \and author2} \abstract{ Long, drawn out abstract, blah, blah, blah. } \captionedimage {myimage.pdf}{caption text} \captionedimage {myimage2.pdf}{caption text2} In the second file would be the main document, including the first. Although I have never done anything like this, obviously if I want a new style the thing to do is write a new .sty and .cls file for the new style I want. Hypothetically, the main document could look like this ( I am using C preprocessor includes to illustrate what I'm going for)
#include "individualpage.tex" \documentclass[12pt]{simpleabstract} \begin{document} \maketitle %% Insert a bold title font at the top of the page %% insert the abstract defined by the student here %% if there is an image, insert it here \end{document} The first question is whether anything like this exists already, since I would rather not reinvent the wheel. I searched for templates for abstracts, but didn't even find a simple example of just a page I want, let alone a setup that would allow me to generate this page, and then alternately put many of them together. It's work, but I know I could mutate a document class to make the page look I want. However, before I try I would like to know that there isn't something that already exists to do this. Here is what I want the one page to look like:
The second question is how to automate taking two hundred of these and creating a single document of them. That would presumably take a different document style, one that has a title page, some introductory text, then a table of contents selected from the title of each abstract, and the abstract pages. It is primarily for this reason that I would rather not have the individual students embed the latex code that defines the document, but would rather have that in a separate file. If they embed their document style in a page, then to build the larger document I must wrap that in a larger document.
I have tried to illustrate what I want to achieve using the C++ preprocessor to hook files together, and of course one way of implementing this is to use perl or some other text processing language to process these files in some way. But perhaps in my ignorance of LaTeX, I'm not aware that some facility like that already exists, hence this question: is there some standardized way to achieve this or will it require custom programming on my part?
standalonepackage.)combine,abstbookorconfprocpackages can help you.