authorator

A Python program to create a LaTeX file with a large number of authors and affiliations.

Authorator inputs a csv file with the authors and their affiliations, and outputs a LaTeX file that can be imported into the document via \input, or simply cut-and-pasted into your main manuscript file.

Caveats:

• Need to \usepackage{authblk} in your Latex file preamble.
• Need to create your title page with \maketitle
• Because authorator uses utf-8, you may need to compile your LaTeX file using XeTeX. Conversely, you can convert your latex file to ASCII using iconv or somesuch. Pure ASCII not implemented yet.
• Uses Python3

authors csv file

The input file to authorator is a tab-delimited csv file. It should have four columns: First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Affiliations. The field delimiter does not have to be tab, and can be changed using the --delim option. It is not recommended to change to common characters (such as a comma) since those are probably in the Affiliations anyway, and may break the parser.

See example_authors.csv for example formatting.

• First Name, Middle Name, Last Name: author's names. One author per line
• Affiliations: the author's affiliations examples). If an author has more than one affiliation, those are separated by a ";". The separator character can be modified using the --affildelim option. In the example file, Darwin and Spock have two affiliations. Dr. McCoy has one affiliaiton, which is the same as one of Spock's.
• Title line: the first line of the authors csv file should be a title line, tab-delimited, with the field names in the following order: First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Affiliations

How to run

Simplest way to run:

./authorator -i authors.csv -o authors.tex

This will create a tex file with the authors affiliations. See example_authors.tex for the result of the input of example_authors.csv. Note that you need to \usepackage{authblk} in your LaTeX document to make this work. NEW: you can now run in Simple Mode (--simple) where you can do without authblk. See below for details.

How to put the authors list in your LaTeX document

Your LaTeX document should look something line this:

\documentclass{article}
.
.
\usepackage{authblk}
.
.
\input{authors} % your authors.tex file
.
.
\title{My long manuscript with many authors}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Write lots of smart stuff here.

\end{document}

Items of note

• Author order in the LaTeX file is the same as in the csv file.
• If two authors have the same affiliations, they should be spelled and written exactly the same. If not, a new affiliation will be created, since authorator will see them as different.

Advanced

Many options can be changed. Run ./authorator -h for details.

• Header file: default none. If you would like some standard preamble, you can create a file containing its text. authorator --headerfile to input it.

• Footer file: default none. Adds text after the author and affiliations list. Right now there is some default text in the code that makes the authors name in footnote size, and the affiliations in italics. The footer file can override that.

• --simple/-s Simple mode: does not require the \usepackage{authblk}. The output can be imported or cut/pasted into any place in your manuscript, instead of depending on the title. This is espacially useful for non-standard journal templates. See file example_authors_simple.tex for example output.

Todo:

• Implement ASCII output
• Different name formats for writing: right now it's first name first only. Would like to enable last name first, initials, etc.
• Use ORCID ID as input, and use the ORCID API to get the author information