The metacapture package

The metacapture package provides a mechanism for authors to express their metadata in a way that separates it from the styling of the page. 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 in 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 documentation for the metacapture package is contained in the metacapture-doc.tex file (along with the metacapture-doc.pdf file). There is also a metacapture-sample.tex file that demonstrates the many uses of the metacapture package.

The metacapture package was developed for use in the iacrj.cls document class that is used for IACR journals, but may be used by others. There is also a companion open source project for a LaTeX workflow located at a separate github repository. Further information about this can be found at two articles that were published by the authors:

• An article in arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10424
• An article in TUGboat: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-3/tb144bos-workflow.html

Bugs on this can be filed at the github repository