Bug#337805: tetex-bin: dvips should include document's title in Postscript instead of DVI filename

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Pierre THIERRY <nowhere.man@levallois.eu.org> wrote:

> Package: tetex-bin
> Version: 2.0.2-31
> Severity: wishlist
>
> When generating the Postscript, dvips puts the filename of the DVI in
> the Title:
>
> 	%%Title: foo.dvi
>
> It should be possible to have the document's title when it is somewhat
> available, like in most LaTeX documents.
>
> e.g.
>
> 	%%Title: History of Foo
>
> when you have
>
> 	\title{History of Foo}

This would really be nice, but there's a problem:  Currently this
information is not available in the dvi file.  A dvi file is, in
general, just a description of where letters or other forms should be
put on a page, without any information about document attributes or
relations between parts of the document.

It isn't impossible, however, since a dvi file can contain "special"
commands - this is used e.g. to transfer the information about
hyperlinks when you create pdf files with latex/dvipdfm or
latex/dvips/ps2pdf.  Therefore it might already be possible to change
dvips to use information provided by the hyperref package, or if not one
would have to create a new package (or extend hyperref) to enable dvips
to get the information.


This is, of course, beyond what we as Debian Maintainers of teTeX can
do.  How do we proceed?  We can forward the request to the dvips
maintainers, but AFAICS development of dvips is pretty slow, if not
dead, these days.  Chances are better that this will be implemented if
someone steps up with a patch.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer