Epigraphs are those neat quotations that authors put at the start of chapters (or even at the end of chapters: Knuth puts things at the ends of chapters of the TeXbook).
Typesetting them is a bit of a fiddle, but not impossible to do for yourself. However, the epigraph package will do the job for you, even in situations where it's particularly nasty to get right.
The package defines an \epigraph
command, for creating a single
epigraph (as at the top of a chapter):
and an epigraphs environment, for entering more than one epigraph consecutively, in a sort of list introduced by\chapter{The Social Life of Rabbits} \epigraph{Oh! My ears and whiskers!}% {Lewis Carroll}
\qitem
commands:
The\begin{epigraphs} \qitem{What I tell you three times is true}% {Lewis Carroll} \qitem{Oh listen do, I'm telling you!}% {A.A. Milne} \end{epigraphs}
\epigraphhead
command enables you to place your epigraph
above a chapter header:
The <distance> says how far above the chapter heading the epigraph is to go; it's expressed in terms of the\setlength{\unitlength}{1pt} ... \chapter{The Social Life of Rabbits} \epigraphhead[<distance>]{% \epigraph{Oh! My ears and whiskers!}% {Lewis Carroll}% }
\unitlength
that's used in the picture
environment; the package's
author recommends 70pt
.
The package also offers various tricks for adjusting the layout of
chapter header (necessary if you've found a hugely long quotation for
an \epigraphhead
), for patching the bibliography, for patching
\part
pages, and so on. (Some of these suggested patches lead you
through writing your own package...)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=epigraph