Re: package the right way?

On Aug 7, 8:41 pm, danmc91 <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've been a user of LaTeX for many years and am looking at doing
something a bit more structured than I have in the past and want to
see if I'm thinking about things correctly.

I'm compiling a bunch of notes I have on various plants.  For each
species, I'll have things listed like scientific name, common name(s),
leaf type, leaf shape, etc.  I hope to grow the # of species to a
moderately large number over several years but want to maintain
consistent formatting.

So, is the right approach here to create a new package, say "plants"
and for each chapter or section in my notes I'd have something like:

\begin{species}{Acer negundo}

% list of common names
\cname{boxelder}
\cname{ashleaf maple}
\cname{Manitoba maple}

% list of identifying attributes.  Not all may be listed
\leaftype{pinnately compound}
\leafmargin{lobed}
\leafscar{.....}
\stipularscar{....}
\description{\species\ is a species of maple native to North
America.   More detailed description here}

\end{species}

Then my species package would spit out all the information in the
order and formatting I want.

Is this the "right" way or best practices way to go about this (write
a package and define a new environment to let me identify data as
being of a particular type)?  If not, is there a better way?  Any good
pointers to a nice "starter" package to look at to learn from?

My goal is to spend time on compiling the information and not a lot of
time reformatting things manually to maintain consistency.

This seems to me like a perfectly good way to go about this. If
you're following this sort of markup strictly then just about anything
should work, and it would be easy to write a perl script to reformat
things if you needed to change at a later time. You could also even
export to XML and use some sort of XSLT to change it into any other
sort of format, but I don't know anything about that (beyond the
discussion going on in a nearby thread).

Maybe you're already thinking of this, but in case you weren't, it
would certainly be a piece of cake to have \species defined here as
\textit{A. negundo} by simply grabbing the first letter and then using
a delimited argument to discard everything up to the first space.

But since LaTeX is supposed to be a markup language, I would say
you're definitely on the right track in designing your own markup to
fit in with it. Oh, and be careful with spaces in that sort of thing
- all the close-braces can cause lots of unwanted space, and I've seen
some horrible hacks to deal with it when usually something more like
\ignorespaces would have worked a lot better.

Cheers,
steve
.

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