[Axiom-developer] RE: date of pamphlet documents

[Bill Page]

On August 14, 2006 2:13 AM William Sit wrote:
> 
> When a pamphlet file is rendered, the date of the pdf file is always
> \today. That seems to be misleading, as many of the source files have
> not been updated for ages.

I think the use of \today in the LaTeX source is inappropriate unless
for some reason the author really does want the date on which the
document was compiled displayed in the text. Usually it is better
to simply hard code a fixed date and manually update that when it
is appropriate.

> Would it be possible to post the date of the last modification of
> the pamphlet file (taken from the file attribute of the PAMPHLET
> file, not the tex or pdf file)? Of course, this change of date from
> \today to file date should not be done to the pamphlet itself, but
> should be part of the extraction process by weave (or better, by
> the \usepackage{axiom} using a modified \maketitle macro) so that 
> instead of inserting \today, one inserts the last modification date
> of the pamphlet file (without touching it) to the tex source before
> applying latex.

That is a neat idea, but it is a LaTeX thing that is beyond my skill
level in LaTeX. If there was such a macro that used the file date,
then we could use that in our pamphlet files.

> 
> BTW, in generating the tex source, perhaps one could also set up
> to \usepackage{hyperref}, as part of \usepackage{axiom}? or 
> should this be left to the author?

I think it should be left to the author.

> 
> Just minor suggestions. Not a high priority if there is no easy
> solution.
> 

Thanks.

Regards,
Bill Page.