Special Pages I

We’ve already briefly seen the title page and table of contents at the start of every document. But there are more special pages that are usually included in LaTeX documents. They were important enough to get proper support.

In this chapter and the next, we’ll talk about these four:

• Appendix
• Index
• Glossary
• Nomenclature

Appendix

Usually, you want your document to be as short and snappy as possible. When I wrote my Mathematics thesis at the university, they set a strict maximum of 20 pages for the main content.

You can’t describe and report deep technical research in so few pages! Only 20! I barely finished my introduction!

But you can give the most important details, and move everything else to some section at the back of the document. In other words: the appendix.

It holds background information or information that was relevant but not crucial enough for the main document. For example, a book on LaTeX might mention the existence of a few commands/environments. But if you want to go in-depth, it refers you to the appendix.

First, include the appendix package. This gives you the appendices environment.

You can even use a subappendices environment within it, with \subsections. These appendices are numbered with capital letters, instead of numbers. Otherwise, they are nothing special, which means you can use any command here as well.

 1\usepackage{appendix}
 2
 3\begin{document}
 4    \begin{appendices}
 5        \section{What I Forgot}
 6        Lorem Ipsum...
 7        \begin{subappendices}
 8            \subsection{Important stuff}
 9            Lorem ipsum...
10            \subsection{Leftovers}
11            Lorem ipsum...
12        \end{subappendices}
13    \end{appendices}
14\end{document}

The package can take a number of useful (optional) properties:

 1\usepackage[title, titletoc]{appendix}
 2
 3\begin{document}
 4    \tableofcontents
 5    \begin{appendices}
 6        \section{What I Forgot}
 7        Lorem Ipsum...
 8        \section{And Something Else}
 9        Lorem Ipsum...
10    \end{appendices}
11\end{document}

Index

An index contains all important words from the document, in alphabetic order, together with the page(s) on which they occur. Of course, it would be a pain to count every occurrence of a word yourself.

Make your life a lot easier with a package called imakeidx (i make index).

Every time you want a word included in the index, type \index{word} immediately after it. This command doesn’t render the text—otherwise the word would be doubled every time—but signals the index that an occurrence is here.

If you want the document to keep track of these, type \makeindex at the top of your document. This makes compilation a lot slower, if the document is large. If you’re not compiling for publication, you might want to comment it out.

Then, to actually print the index, use \printindex. Everything together …

 1\usepackage{imakeidx}
 2\makeindex
 3
 4\begin{document} 
 5    An appendix\index{appendix} is a section containing extra background information\index{information} for whatever was inside the document, or information\index{information} that isn't important for everyone reading the main document. 
 6    
 7    For example, a book on \LaTeX{} could provide an appendix\index{appendix} that explains how to deal with rare errors during installation or usage.
 8    
 9    \printindex
10\end{document}

It’s also possible, to nest these keywords. For example, say you give an important definition at the first page, and later provide some definitions that expand the first one. Then clarify they belong together using \index{parent!word}.

1Arithmetic\index{arithmetic} is fascinating subject. 
2
3We'll talk mostly about addition\index{arithmetic!addition}, subtraction\index{arithmetic!subtraction}, multiplication\index{arithmetic!multiplication} and division\index{arithmetic!division}. 
4
5Have fun!
6
7\printindex

Lastly, the \makeindex command receives optional arguments:

 1\usepackage{imakeidx}
 2\makeindex[columns=1,title=Mighty Index]
 3
 4\begin{document}
 5Arithmetic\index{arithmetic} is fascinating subject. 
 6
 7We'll talk mostly about addition\index{arithmetic!addition}, subtraction\index{arithmetic!subtraction}, multiplication\index{arithmetic!multiplication} and division\index{arithmetic!division}. 
 8
 9Have fun!
10
11\printindex
12\end{document}