I'm currently doing a home course on short story writing. Or should I say I attempt to as I haven't been returning my assignments very promptly. Anyway, one of the requirements is that each assignment is formatted in such a way that the footer of each page contains the page number, starting at 1 on the first page, and the letters mf for More Follows on every page except the last one. In order to do this, I need to be able to set a specific footer for the last page and one for all other pages. I tried to do that with OpenOffice.org to start with but there was no way to identify whether you were on the last page using a macro with version 2.4, which is what I was using when I started. As you would expect, it is surprisingly easy to do with LaTeX, provided you import the correct packages.
- In order to specify a custom footer (or header), I will need the
fancyhdr
package; - I will also need to be able to use some if/then/else logic to output something different whether I am on the last page or not, this is provided by the
ifthen
package; - Finally, I will need to know whether I am on the last page, which is provided by the aptly named
lastpage
package.
Putting all this together, the document's code needs to do the following:
- Import all relevant packages;
- Set the page style to
fancy
; - Set all headers and footers to blank;
- Set the header and footer lines to 0 points (optional, you may like the defaults);
- Set the right hand side footer so that it implements this logic:
- If the page is the last one, print nothing;
- Otherwise, print mf.
- Set the left hand side footer to the current page's number.
And here is the resulting code:
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} \usepackage{lastpage} \usepackage{ifthen} \usepackage{fancyhdr} \pagestyle{fancy} \fancyhf{} \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt} \renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt} \fancyfoot[R]{\ifthenelse{\thepage=\pageref{LastPage}}{}{mf}} \fancyfoot[L]{Page~\thepage} \begin{document} The content of the document goes here. \end{document}
2 comments:
This is great! Thank you for posting, using this information I was able to create an AP style document using no header on the first page and the --MORE-- footer on all but the last page which contains a --30-- footer.
%header stuff
\rhead{\fancyplain{}{\ifthenelse{\thepage=1}{}{\thepage\\}}}
\lhead{\fancyplain{}{\ifthenelse{\thepage=1}{}{MyLastName\\ The Slug}}}
% footer stuff
\cfoot{\fancyplain{}{\ifthenelse{\thepage=\pageref{LastPage}}{--30--}{-- MORE --}}}
I'm glad this worked for you. This shows how powerful Latex can be when you need slightly unusual formatting.
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