32 Title and subtitle

The metadata fields title and, if the article has a subtitle, subtitle must be present. They may contain markdown formatting and special symbols, but no explicit linebreaks.¹

In addition, you may provide:

shorttitle: shorter title to use in page headers and the table of contents.
title-latex, subtitle-latex: title to be used in PDF’s output on the article’s first page and (unless (sub)title-cover is specified) on the article’s offprint cover. Used to specify explicit line breaks.
title-cover, subtitle-cover: title to be used in PDF’s output on the offprint cover. Used to specify explicit linebreaks.

Here is an example using all the available fields. They are explained in detail in the sections below.

title: Plain title here
subtitle: Plain subtitle here
subtitle-separator: ':'
shorttitle: Shorter title for page headers
title-latex: |
  Title for the first page title \
  (and cover unless otherwise specified) \
  with possibly some linebreaks
subtitle-latex: |
  Subtitle for the first page title \
  (and cover unless otherwise specified) \
  with possibly some linebreaks
title-cover: |
  Title for the offprint cover \
  with possibly some \
  different linebreaks
subtitle-cover: |
  Subtitle for the cover
title-cover-size: \huge
subtitle-cover-size: \Large

32.1 Short title

If the title is too long to fit in the header, you can specify a short title in addition:

title: An extremely long-winded and verbose title about a range of topics including but not restricted to the weather
shorttitle: A long-winded title about the weather

This will be used in the table of contents too.

32.1.1 Linebreaks in a title and subtitle

Requires: dialectica templates.

In LaTeX/PDF output it is sometimes useful to manually specify a line break within the title and/or subtitle. There are two fields to provide this, title-latex and title-cover:

title: A Very Long Title that Can be Broken in Various Places
title-latex: |
  A Very Long Title that \
  Can be Broken in Various Places
title-cover: |
  A Very Long Title that Can be\
  Broken in Various Places

In a metadata field, the \ at then end of a line specifies a linebreak. Warning: it must be immediately followed by an end of line (no spaces!).

title-latex controls the title on the first page (“chapter” title). It also sets the offprint cover page unless title-cover is also supplied.
title-cover controls the title on the offprint’s cover page. If you want title-latex to modify the first page’s title only, simply insert title-cover with the same content as title.

The title field must be provided, even if title-cover and/or title-latex are given.

By default titles on the offprint’s cover are of LaTeX size \Huge if they are less than 31 characters long, otherwise the slightly smaller size \huge. You can specify a custom LaTeX size if needed (\Huge, \huge, \LARGE, \Large, \large etc.) with the title-cover-size field. This only affects LaTeX/PDF output.

title-cover-size: \huge

The same options are available for subtitles: use subtitle-latex, subtitle-cover and subtitle-cover-size. The default size for subtitles on offprint covers is \LARGE.

32.2 Subtitle in the table of contents

The subtitle is used in three places. On the paper’s first page and on the offprint’s cover, it is printed below the title, in smaller font. It’s also used in the table of contents, where it’s printed after a column:

title: Frankstein
subtitle: The Modern Prometheus

Output in the table of contents:

Frankenstein: The Modern Promoetheus

You can override the colon by specifying a subtitle separator, e.g. a simple space:

title: So What?
subtitle: My Quest for the Meaning of Life
subtitleseparator: ' '

You may enter a long title or a title containing quotation marks as a text block, this does not constitute explicit line breaks. See Section 8.3 and Section 8.5.↩︎