Achim wrote: > > - share your thoughts and sample trials with us > > Below is my attempt to define the TOC of the ``Handbook of Mathematical > Logic'' which is a collection of articles from different authors where > each chapter has its own TOC. There were three (minor) problems: great; it is really gratifying to see that the concepts are actually being used by somebody other than me and i think looks promising as for the minor problems: > o In the main TOC the extra field is used for the name of the author, > so I had to change the template to pass this field as second > argument to `title-format'. you are right in assuming that the unused field in the toc data structure should be used for passing on something like an authors name. i find it acceptable to assume that for special applications (and i would consider a multi-authored book a somewhat special application) one would need specialized templates. however, it should be evaluated it it isn't possible to provide for this case in the standard templates already (at least better) and you show one way to do this. you have solved that problem in your example code by making title-format an f2 but defaulting it to just a single argument, ie > title-format =f2 [#1] \COtitle@format, and then have a spec like that: > title-format = #1\IfNoValueF{#2}{\comma\space\textit{#2}}, to append the second argument if available. another possible approach would be to consider title-format, number-format as something only responsible for typesetting the immediate text (eg setting it in a certain font etc) and have a) and additional key that is responsible to format the extra text if available and b) another key that is resonsible to put all those together somehow. don't know. at some point in the code smebody has to check for NoValue in `number' and `extra' and has to make some decision about it. i just wonder whether it should be done in the key values or hidden in the templates? > o The separation betwenn number and title is annoying for the `part' > entries where I had to choose (by trial and error) a fixed width of > the number field to get the spacing right. this is definitely a restriction in the template definition which should be lifted. there are enough designs which define that the number should be a fixed value away from following text, or in that case that the number and the text should simply form a single sequence. (Heading specs would have comparable requirements) so there need to be a better spec replacing or adding to: \TemplateKey{number-width}{l} {Width of the space reserved for the document object number. Space is reserved regardless of whether or not the number is present.} {} any suggestions to offer anybody? > o There seems to be no way to add spacing under an entry > (`post-v-action') to enlarge the space between a part and the first > chapter. quite right. call it forgotten. it would not hurt and sometimes help and the default could be to do nothing thanks for enlarging the test samples this is really helping a lot frank