The PreTeXt Guide

An <appendix> holds material that supports the main narrative but would interrupt it—background a reader may already have, lengthy tables, or a sample of code. Appendices live in the <backmatter>, after the final <chapter> or <section>, and you may have as many as you like. They are numbered with capital letters, Appendix A, Appendix B, and so on, which keeps them visibly distinct from the numbered divisions of the body.

An appendix is structured like the division it follows: in a <book> it may contain <section>s, and in an <article> it may contain <subsection>s, or it may simply hold top-level content with no further divisions. It may also carry the specialized divisions (Section 4.7), so a substantial appendix can have its own <exercises> or <references>.

Automatic lists (Section 4.29) can appear anywhere, but an appendix is a very natural place to place one. A list of notation, or a list of figures, is a common example, each gathered automatically from across the whole document. An appendix can even consist of nothing but such a list, as in this list of every <theorem>, organized by <chapter>.

<appendix>
    <title>List of Theorems</title>
    <idx>theorems, list of</idx>
    <list-of elements="theorem" divisions="chapter"/>
</appendix>

A colophon is a traditional note on how a book was made. This back colophon—what most authors think of as the colophon—is the last thing in the <backmatter>. Unlike the front colophon (Subsection 4.25.4), which is an automatically-generated copyright page, its content is entirely yours to author: a sequence of ordinary paragraphs, optionally with a <sidebyside>. So it is a good place to record the typefaces and software (PreTeXt?) used to produce the book, the history of its editions, or an acknowledgement of support.

The front and back colophons share the single element name <colophon>, distinguished only by their placement, so take care to author this one as a child of <backmatter>.