[Tex/LaTex] Cute (child-friendly) document in LaTeX

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My girlfriend is teacher at primary school, she's new using LaTeX and she needs to make a "cute document" for kids, but I don't know how change the following items to make them look nice for the kids:

  • parts,
  • sections,
  • page number/number of pages
  • and all this things to make a cute document.

Best Answer

I made a humble attempt of a cute document with memoir and some Inkscape graphics. :) Please bear with me, after all, cuteness is in the eye of the beholder. :)

Spoiler alert:

! Don't laugh at my duck, please.

Jake and I were talking in the TeX and friends chatroom a few months ago about funny chapter styles for memoir. For the fun of it, we made a theme based on Super Mario Bros. I drew Mario and a goomba:

Image 1

Later, we added a feature that added as many goombas as the chapter number - Chapter 3 would have three goombas, and so on.

Jake made an awesome Yoshi code that extended his tongue to fill the line:

Image 2

Sadly, the code is not available, for obvious reasons: Nintendo wouldn't be happy. After all, those characters are copyrighted. What we did was just a humble case study of "different" styles for documents based on memoir.

That said, I think we could use some ideas from this "exercise". I drew two elements in Inkscape, a flower and a duck:

Inkscape

I then exported both images to a tikzpicture via a nice plugin called inkscape2tikz. This step is not mandatory, after all, we can simply print those images to a vector format - say, .pdf - and include them as images (it's way easier).

In order to make our lives easier, I created a new package called duck:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{duck}[2012/18/07 Duck style for memoir]

\RequirePackage{graphicx}
\RequirePackage{xcolor}
\RequirePackage{tikz}
\RequirePackage{xspace}

\definecolor{cffffff}{RGB}{255,255,255}
\definecolor{cffcc00}{RGB}{255,204,0}
\definecolor{c008000}{RGB}{0,128,0}
\definecolor{caa8800}{RGB}{170,136,0}
\definecolor{cd4aa00}{RGB}{212,170,0}
\definecolor{ce6e6e6}{RGB}{230,230,230}

\newcommand{\drawduck}{%
  ... TikZ code here ...
}

\newcommand{\drawflower}{%
... TikZ code here ...
}

\newcounter{myflowers}

\newcommand{\flowers}[1]{%
\setcounter{myflowers}{-1}\loop\stepcounter{myflowers}\ifnum\value{myflowers} < #1 \drawflower\repeat%
}

\makechapterstyle{weloveducks}{%
\chapterstyle{default}
\renewcommand*{\chapnamefont}{\color{olive}\bfseries\HUGE}
\renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\hfill\bfseries\HUGE}
\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\chapnamefont\thechapter\xspace\flowers{\thechapter}}
\renewcommand*{\printchaptertitle}[1]{%
\drawduck\bfseries\HUGE\hfill ##1%
}}

The TikZ code is huge. The full sample duck.sty file is available here.

Now, let's go to our .tex file. I opted to use a system font, so I went with xelatex. I don't like to change \parskip, \parindent and line spacing, but I thought that for this particular document, some adjustments would make the text easier to be read by a kid.

\documentclass[14pt]{memoir}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Segoe Print}

\usepackage{kantlipsum}

\usepackage{duck}

\begin{document}

\chapterstyle{weloveducks}

\setlength{\parskip}{1.5\baselineskip}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\OnehalfSpacing

\chapter{The journey begins}

Hi, I am a duck. Quack!

\kant[1]

\chapter{The journey continues}

\kant[2]

\chapter{The journey ends}

\kant[3]

\end{document}

The output:

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

This is surely the most clumsy duck drawing ever in the history of duck drawing. :)

Note that the number of flowers grow together with the chapter counter. Kant text is provided by kantlipsum. And memoir is awesome, as always. :)

Hope you guys like it. :)

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