metacapture – A package for the capture of author-supplied metadata

Curation and indexing of metadata is a crucial part of journal publishing. The metacapture package is one component in an open source workflow implementation that is designed to automate the production and copy editing of journal articles. It is used by the iacrj document class for the journal IACR CiC, but can also be used for other journals. It is intended primarily for use by LaTeX document class designers, but may also be useful for authors who may wish to change their document class in the future.

When a document that loads metacapture.sty is compiled, it produces a YAML-like text file containing all metadata from the document. The metacapture package accomplishes this by providing replacements for the generic macros \title, \author and \maketitle macros that have traditionally been used by document classes. The metacapture package also provides several implementations of the \maketitle macro n different styles, partly as a way to demonstrate how to separate metadata capture from styling of front matter. Document class designers can also write their own implementation of \maketitle with their preferred styling using the dictionary-like data structures used to hold author metadata.

The metacapture package is part of a larger set of tools for implementing a journal publishing workflow. There is also a companion open source implementation of a publishing workflow written in Python that is used for this journal and provides a simplified workflow for copy editing and production. Further information on this workflow can be found in two articles that were published by the authors:

• Lowering the Cost of Diamond Open Access Journals,
• A LaTeX publishing workflow

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