3.4.4 Copyright Page

By international treaty, the copyright notice for a book must be either on the title page or on the back of the title page. When the copyright notice is on the back of the title page, that page is customarily not numbered. Therefore, in Texinfo, the information on the copyright page should be within @titlepage and @end titlepage commands.

Use the @page command to cause a page break. To push the copyright notice and the other text on the copyright page towards the bottom of the page, use the following incantation after @page:

@vskip 0pt plus 1filll

The @vskip command inserts whitespace in the TeX output; it is ignored in all other output formats. The ‘0pt plus 1filll’ means to put in zero points of mandatory whitespace, and as much optional whitespace as needed to push the following text to the bottom of the page. Note the use of three ‘l’s in the word ‘filll’; this is correct.

To insert the copyright text itself, write @insertcopying next (see Document Permissions):

@insertcopying

Follow the copying text by the publisher, ISBN numbers, cover art credits, and other such information.

Here is an example putting all this together:

@titlepage
…
@page
@vskip 0pt plus 1filll
@insertcopying

Published by …

Cover art by …
@end titlepage

We have one more special case to consider: for plain text output, you must insert the copyright information explicitly if you want it to appear. For instance, you could have the following after the copyright page:

@ifplaintext
@insertcopying
@end ifplaintext

You could include other title-like information for the plain text output in the same place.