Publishing conference proceedings using LaTeX part III: polishing the proceedings

This is the last part of the "creating proceedings using LaTeX" series. In two previous posts, I explained some guidelines to give to the writers of articles, then how to include the resulting pdf in LaTeX. I will now details some polishing for the proceedings.

Having a table of contents

With the pdfpages package, I explained how to add lines in the TOC for every inserted pdf. You then have just to use the \tableofcontents macro.
Since the workshop will be organized into section, I wanted to group the articles into sessions in the table of contents (TOC). I created a counter (to number the sessions), and a macro to create a new session (with a title).

\newcounter{sessioncount}
\setcounter{sessioncount}{0}

\newcommand\addsession[1]{
  \stepcounter{sessioncount}
  \addtocontents{toc}{\vskip 8pt {\noindent\Large 
    {\sc Session \arabic{sessioncount}} #1}\protect\par}
}

The \addsession macro takes a title as argument and adds a line in the TOC, looking like this:

SESSION X: session title

So I inserted three of these between the inclusion of articles.

Finally, I wanted to have the workshop name & date at the top of all pages, plus page numbers at the bottom. I used the fancyhdr package which allows "fancy headers."

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}      % don't forget this or it won't work!

This initializes the package, then we can make our own design using:

\fancyhead{}
\fancyfoot{}
\renewcommand\headrulewidth{0pt}
\fancyhead[L]{\it Workshop title}
\fancyhead[R]{\it Some location, Year}
\fancyfoot[C]{\thepage}

First, we remove any existing headers and footers, then remove the line below the headers (by setting its width to 0pt). Then I choose to add the workshop name at the top left, the location and date at the top right, and finally page numbers for all pages at the bottom center. These are inserted on all pages, in particular pages included from other pdfs!