book-designchaptersfncychappackagessectioning
I use fncychap this way:
\usepackage[Conny]{fncychap}
This lets me have pretty decent chapters, ToC and title page design. But the options are scarce and too popular.
Are there any other packages I can use in the same way?
\usepackage[Otherstyle]{otherpack}
Here's a solution: using the xparse package I defined a new command \ChapIma with one optional argument and two mandatory arguments; the optional argument will be the text used for the ToC; the first mandatory argument is the text for the document, and the third mandatory argument is the name of the file containing the corresponding image.
The titlesec package was used to customize the chapter title format.
I also defined another command \Caption, which behaves as the standard caption, but writes the text in the space reserved for marginal notes. This command must be invoked somewhere in the first line of text of the chapter.
The caption package was used to customize the caption in the marginal notes (suppressing the label).
The lettrine package was used to produce the drop cap.
I used the fancyhdr package (I couldn't make titlesec's pagestyles option behave well, so I had to use fancyhdr) to redefine the plain page; I also defined the page style for other pages.
\documentclass[twoside]{book}
\usepackage{xparse,ifthen}
\usepackage[calcwidth]{titlesec}
\usepackage{changepage}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\newlength\mylen
\DeclareDocumentCommand\ChapIma{omm}
{\let\cleardoublepage\relax
\ifthenelse{\isodd{\value{page}}}
{\mbox{}\clearpage}{\mbox{}\clearpage\mbox{}\clearpage}%
\resizebox{.9\textwidth}{.9\textheight}{\includegraphics{#3}}
\mbox{}\thispagestyle{empty}\clearpage
\IfNoValueTF{#1}{\chapter{#2}}{\chapter[#1]{#2}}
}
\DeclareDocumentCommand\Caption{om}
{\marginnote{\parbox{\marginparwidth}{%
\captionsetup[figure]{labelformat=empty}
\IfNoValueTF{#1}{\captionof{figure}{#2}}{\captionof{figure}[#1]{#2}}
}%
}%
}
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]
{\Huge\normalfont\sffamily}{}{2pc}
{\setlength\mylen{0pt}%
\addtolength\mylen{\marginparwidth}%
\addtolength\mylen{\marginparsep}\raggedleft
}
[\vspace{-20pt}%
{%
\begin{adjustwidth}{}{-\mylen}
\makebox[\linewidth][r]{%
\rule{\dimexpr\titlewidth+\mylen\relax}{0.4pt}%
}%
\end{adjustwidth}%
}%
]
\titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{1cm}{7cm}
\renewcommand\chaptermark[1]{\markboth{#1}{}}
\fancypagestyle{plain}{%
\fancyhf{}
\fancyfoot[OR]{\sffamily\small\MakeUppercase{\leftmark}~~\oldstylenums{\thepage}}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}
\fancyfootoffset[OR]{\dimexpr\marginparsep+\marginparwidth\relax}
}
\fancyhf{}
\fancyfootoffset[OR]{\dimexpr\marginparsep+\marginparwidth\relax}
\fancyfootoffset[EL]{\dimexpr\marginparsep+\marginparwidth\relax}
\fancyfoot[OR]{\small\sffamily\MakeUppercase{\leftmark}~~\oldstylenums{\thepage}}
\fancyfoot[EL]{\small\sffamily\oldstylenums{\thepage}~~\MakeUppercase{\rightmark}}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\renewcommand\chaptermark[1]{\markboth{#1}{}}
\renewcommand\sectionmark[1]{\markright{#1}}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\ChapIma{Preface}{ctanlion}
\lettrine{T}{his} is some initial text\Caption{This is the caption for the figure; this is just some test text}
\lipsum[1-5]
\ChapIma{Introduction}{ctanlion}
\lipsum[1]
\section{Qu'ran manuscripts}
\lipsum[1-14]
\end{document}
Here's an image of four pages of the resulting document:
The CTAN lion used in the example was drawn by Duane Bibby.
An option would be to use the ltxgrid package, developed by Arthur Ogawa as part of the revtex distribution that is used to typeset papers for the American Physics Society (aps.org) journals.
The ltxgrid package was commissioned by the American Physical Society
and is distributed under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License,
the same license under which all the portions of LaTeX itself is distributed.
See lppl for the license details.
As concerning the "moral obligation" of commercial use of multicol I think the arguments you put forward, are contradictory and your concerns unfounded. You say in the comments:
...the just fee would probably be substantial and (b) there is nothing wrong, and I indeed feel indebted to the TeX community; however, I am barely in black recently...
The moral obligation is to thank the author of the package in any way you can afford, when the commercial venture is on the way and to make a contribution later on as you may deem fit once it starts generating substantial income and as you say the just fee becomes substantial. Same is morally true for any of the free source software, either being TeX related or otherwise. Just don't talk to a lawyer listen to your inner self. As I mentioned in https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/37352/963, the LaTeX project can do with some funding.
Many corporate beneficiaries of both publicly funded research as well as open source software have indigestion when it comes to giving something back to the community. You can find an interesting discussion at the HN thread Research Bought, Then Paid For: Open Access to Science Under Attack. I find this disheartening and a poor trait of the human nature.
Best Answer
As far as I know, there's no such ready to use package similar to
fncychap. However, you have some possibilities:The
memoirdocument class has some predefined chapter styles (see Section 6.5 Chapter headings of the manual). You can easily use one of those predefined styles or define your own (the manual has examples). If you want to use some of the predefined styles but don't want to usememoir, you can easily see how the styles were implemented and use this to implement them yourself (using thetitlesecpackage, for example).The
titlesecpackage lets you define your own styles (the package documentation has some examples).The
classicthesispackage also defines some styles; again, if you don't want to use the class, you can use the styles as an inspiration; the package defines the styles using thetitlesecpackage, so you can easily see how the styles were defined.Vincent Zoonekynd has in
this pagea collection of some styles and the code is available (thanks to Thérèse for helping me to find the link).Some time ago Stefan Kottwitz designed a fancy chapter style using
TikZandtitlesec; you can see it (code available) in his bloghere.Lian Tze Lim from the Malaysian LaTeX User Group has another fancy design (inspired on Stefan's) and you can see it
here. The author provides links to the code. (Thanks to rvf0068 for providing the link).Personally, I don't like much the styles designed by
fncychap.