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I have a series of documents that are programmatically rendered by pdflatex from within a GNU Make makefile.

I'd like to be able to write a Make target that "polls" each document for its \title so that I may amalgamate each one in a "document list".

Can I do this? If so, how?

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I'm not quite sure how you want to get the title from the document to make: it might be handy to give more detail as there will have to be some programming at the LaTeX end in any case. (LaTeX standard classes store the title in \@title but it's not kept after \maketitle.) – Joseph Wright♦ Oct 30 '12 at 11:43
@JosephWright: I think that's probably the answer. There isn't really any more detail as this is merely a concept at this stage. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 30 '12 at 11:46
Depends a bit on how you define "title". Is the title whatever is contained in \title{...}? Or is the title whatever gets put in the PDF metadata for the title? When polling, do you just want to get the title or is it okay to compile the whole document? If the former, what if there are macros in the title - should they be expanded (if they can)? – Andrew Stacey Oct 30 '12 at 11:51
@AndrewStacey: Whatever's in \title. I didn't even know I could configure the PDF metadata distinctly - I'll look into that. Compiling the whole document first would be acceptable but clearly non-optimal. Macros should probably be expanded, yes. I can see now that there are more factors to this than I first realised. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 30 '12 at 11:56
1  
Yup! The thing to do is to look at the documents you actually have and figure out some parameters that will work for those. If the title is quite simple, you could just pipe the documents through a perl script. If it has some expandable macros, you could run tex up to the \title declaration whereupon it expands its argument (as much as possible) and merrily quits (actually, to do it properly it should be the \maketitle that forces the exit). That would save on compiling the rest of the document. – Andrew Stacey Oct 30 '12 at 11:58

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote

The standard classes store the title given using \title in a global macro called \@title. However, this information is not retained after \maketitle (for historical reasons). Thus if you want the information to persist, the easiest way is to redefine \title to save the data in a macro of your choosing

\makeatletter
\xdef\my@title{No \string\title\space given!}
\renewcommand{\title}[1]{%
  \gdef\@title{#1}%
  \gdef\my@title{#1}%
}
\makeatother

while of course retaining the standard set up for \maketitle. You can then use \my@title to recover the information, for example by writing it to the log file.

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Note I've set up \my@title to produce something even if no title was actually given: this may or may not be what is needed. – Joseph Wright♦ Oct 30 '12 at 11:51
1  
If the aim is simply to write the title to a log file (or some other file), why not just adjust the \title macro to write its argument to a file? No need to remember it then. – Andrew Stacey Oct 30 '12 at 11:52
2  
@AndrewStacey Would also make a reasonable answer: the question is rather broad and the best approach will depend on the detail. – Joseph Wright♦ Oct 30 '12 at 12:08
Hence my comments on the main question. – Andrew Stacey Oct 30 '12 at 12:11

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