General ⇒ Problems with own LaTeX style

[Jolly Roger]

Hello!
Recently I decided to upgrade my skills in writing classes and styles packages for LaTeX. As a start I began to write the *.sty which provides title page for abstract.
Title page of the abstract in Ukraine is usually has following markup(see attached example):

Code: Select all

Text "MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF UKRAINE", centered
Name of the Institute/University/school/etc, centered
Title of the abstract, bold, 36pt, centered, a little higher than center of the page

Some vskip.

(The following is right aligned)
Composed by: (student's name)
             (student's group)

Checked by:  (teacher's name)
             (teacher's department)

Some vskip.

City and year, centered(for example: Kyiv - 2007)

For this purpose I made file abstract.sty:

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% abstract

\def\filename{abstract}
\def\fileversion{v0.3}
\def\filedate{2002/10/20}

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}[1995/12/01]
\ProvidesPackage{\filename}

%Name of school/University/Institute
\newcommand{\uchzav}{\renewcommand{\@uchzav}}
\newcommand{\@uchzav}{}

%"Checked by" field
\newcommand{\checkedby}{\renewcommand{\@checkedby}}
\newcommand{\@checkedby}{}

% Title page
\renewcommand{\@maketitle}
{
  \begin{titlepage}
    \let \footnotesize \small
    \let \footnoterule \relax
    \newpage \null
    \vskip 1em
    \let \footnote \thanks
    \begin{center}
      \large \@uchzav
    \end{center}
    \vskip 10.5em
    \begin{center}
      \lineskip 1.2ex
      \textbf{\Huge{\@title}}
    \end{center}
    \vskip 10em
    \begin{flushright} 
      \begin{tabular}[t]{lr}
        \begin{tabular}[t]{r}
          \fontseries{b}\selectfont Composed by: 
        \end{tabular} &
        \begin{tabular}[t]{r}
          \fontseries{m}\selectfont \itshape \@author \\ \null
        \end{tabular} \\
        \begin{tabular}[t]{r}
          \fontseries{b}\selectfont Checked by: 
        \end{tabular} &
        \begin{tabular}[t]{r}
          \fontseries{m}\selectfont \itshape \@checkedby 
        \end{tabular}
      \end{tabular}
    \end{flushright}
    \vfill
    \begin{center}
      \large \@date
    \end{center}
    \vskip 1.5em
  \end{titlepage}
}

I prepared some test document

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\documentclass[ukrainian]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[koi8-u]{inputenc}
\usepackage{abstract}
\usepackage{babel}

\begin{document}
\uchzav{\noun{ministry of science and education of ukraine} \newline %
National Aviation University \newline %
Control Systems Faculty}

\checkedby{Anatoly Kozlov \newline CIC Department}
\author{Andriy Senkovych \newline Group 508}

\title{My Test Title}

\maketitle

This is a test sentence. 

\section{Test 1}
This is a test sentence. This is a test sentence. 
\begin{eqnarray*}
x^{2}-y & = & \sqrt{z^{2}-y^{2}}\\
0 & = & 0\end{eqnarray*}

This is a test sentence. This is a test sentence. This is a test sentence.

\section{Test 2.5}

\tableofcontents{}
\end{document}

The most interesting begins from this.
1) Generated dvi file looks different in xdvi and kdvi. kdvi also shows some big red squares in thumbnails but they disappear in .ps file.
2) I need multiple lines in \author and \checkedby command , but I don't know how make such
3) commands like \uchzav, \author, \checkedby work only if \title is placed after them, but not before.

[pumpkinegan]

There are many things to be concerned about in your style file.

If you are going to use a titlepage, then the documentclass has to be defined

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\documentclass[ukrainian,titlepage]{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
\end{titlepage}
Document text
\end{document}

and the \maketitle command is defunct.

Experiment with something like

Code: Select all

\newcommand{\checkedby}[2]{\noindent #1 \newline #2}

to get multiple line commands.

Other than that, I see an overly complicated definition of a title page. There are skips, fills, tabulars, and font definitions all over the place, and I wonder do you really want them. Keep things simple.