[OS X TeX] Writing an abstract book and custom index

[Steffen Lund Hokland]

Dear All,

I'm currently helping my Mother (if nothing else, I'm at least a good 
son...) writing an abstract book for a conference she's arranging. I've 
poked around CTAN and c.t.t for either a suitable class, or some 
'manual', but haven't had any luck. Each entry should look as:

\customcounter{Title of abstract} %The actual title should then be 
something like: I17 This a Title on Some Bio-stuff where 'I17' is the 
counter value (only the number is incremented, the 'I' means 
'Invited')%

Authors.
Affiliations.

Abstracttext

Acknowledgments

My idea is to have the abstracts in separate .tex files, and \include 
them in the master document. The tex-files would then contain some 
macro:
\newabstract{Title}{author}{affiliations}{text}{thanks}
All the formatting issues will be addressed in the macro-definition....
Is this an obviously stupid approach?

The main problem is that I'd like to make an author index, which refers 
not to the page number, but the abstract number(s) containing the 
author name, e.g.

Foo, John I34, P17

(where I34 and P17 are two different custom counters referring to 
Invited no. 34 and Poster no. 17, respectively). Is this possible at 
all, without getting deep and dirty in Plain TeX?

Thanks for any help, and sorry for the somewhat erratic post.

Steffen

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and 
reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against 
which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily 
in high schools."
-- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary 
rocket work. 

"Correction: It is now definitely established that a rocket can 
function in a vaccuum. The 'Times' regrets the error."
-- NY times, July 1969. 

___________________________________________
Steffen Lund Hokland, MSc.
Research Assistant

The MR-Research Centre
Clinical Inst.
Aarhus University Hospital
Skejby Hospital
DK-8200 Aarhus
Denmark

Phone Office	: 	+45 89495264
Phone Home	:	+45 86166608
Phone Mobile	:	+45 61307461

e-mail		:	hokland at mr.au.dk
___________________________________________

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