books
I wish to turn several of my blog article series into a PDF e-book but I have never used LaTeX before for creating books.
For example, I want to take my Awk One-Liners Explained article series, improve it and turn it into a book.
I'll probably start with this guide that I found – http://www.math.mun.ca/~edgar/thesis.html But that is just a small template. Any other tips, tricks and suggestions for doing it?
Well, from my own experience I would suggest that you first focus on the content, then again on the content and after that, on the content. At the very end, you might play around with different styles and packages to modify the appearance of your text. With a long term project like a book it is very important to get not too much distracted by unimportant things.
In the end, there might be a publisher who insists on a particular style/class anyway. Many publishers in science have their own classes which one is obliged to use. But unless you have a complete manuscript, it is very unlikely that a publisher will agree on publishing your text. So first: just write the stuff with some standard class (the ordinary book class...) and finish the text.
EDIT: OK, maybe this was not too helpful, so here is some more addition:
In a first step you should ask yourself what kind of audience you would like to address. This will determine the way you write very much. In math you want a textbook with exercises and detailed proofs or more a monograph with extended bibliography, etc.
Structure and order your thoughts. Make a table of contents with preliminary summaries of all the sections/subsections. I used to do this in a separate tex-file "plan.tex" or so, which was also subject to change (quite a lot) during the writing.
Be consistent with notation. Before you write, you should fix some notational issues: in particular in math, it is very important that you use the same symbols throughout, use symbols familiar to others, etc.
Making a main.tex with inputs/includes of the chapters which input the sections etc. Here the style/class is not yet essential, it should just support a command like "\chapter". Note that input is a quicker, yet simpler and even limited, command. mwe:
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{book}
\input{packages} %\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
\include{chapter1}
\include{chapter2}
\input{etc}
\end{document}
Fill your files with content. This will take 99% of your time.
Check with some publisher etc where you want to place your work. They will provide a style-file or tell you which one of the standard ones is traditionally used with them. If they want to publish it at all.
Then, and this takes not much work at all compared to the rest, adapt your sources to the class/style needed, fix the hboxes, massage the bibliography, scale the pictures appropriately etc.
So I hope that this is a reasonable workflow. It will be point 5 which really requires the most attention and work, the rest is cosmetics.
You should always provide some code where you have started; writing down your requirements doesn't really help. OTOH, vanilla LaTeX doesn't have a good support for multi-author books. This is a starting point for you mostly based on titlesec package. You have to use the command \chapauthor{name} before \chapter command when you have an author, otherwise \chapauthor{} for things like \tableofcontents.
\documentclass[openright,twoside,10pt]{book}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{%
textwidth = 156mm ,
textheight = 234mm ,
a4paper ,
includehead ,
hcentering ,
vcentering
}
\usepackage[osf,proportional,space]{erewhon}
\usepackage[rigidchapters,pagestyles]{titlesec}
\usepackage{titletoc,lipsum,multicol}
\makeatletter
\newcommand\chap@author{}
\newcommand\chapauthor[1]{%
\cleardoublepage
\gdef\chap@author{#1}%
}
\def\chap@author{}
\titleformat{\chapter}[hang]
{\LARGE\bfseries\filright}
{\thechapter}
{0pt}
{%
\ifx\chap@author\@empty\else
\setlength{\unitlength}{1mm}%
\begin{picture}(0,0)
\put(0,-17){\makebox(0,0)[l]{\Large\mdseries\itshape \chap@author}}
\end{picture}%
\fi
}
[%
\thispagestyle{empty}%
\ifx\chap@author\@empty\else
\addtocontents{toc}{%
\vspace{-5pt}%
\protect\contentsline{chapter}{\mdseries\itshape \chap@author}{}{}%
}%
\addtocontents{toc}{\addvspace{5pt}}%
\fi
\startcontents
]
\titleformat{\section}[hang]
{\Large\bfseries\filright}
{\thesection}
{0pt}
{}
\titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{0pt}{3cm}
\titlespacing*{\section}{0pt}{.75pc}{.5pc}
\newpagestyle{main}{%
\sethead[%
\ifx\chap@author\@empty
{\makebox[1.5pc][l]{\thepage}{\lsstyle\MakeUppercase\chaptertitle}}%
\else
{\makebox[1.5pc][l]{\thepage}{\lsstyle\MakeUppercase\chap@author}}%
\fi]
[][]
{}{}{}
}
\renewcommand\@makefntext[1]{%
\parindent 1em%
\noindent
\hb@xt@1.8em{\hss\@makefnmark\hspace{0.5em}}#1}
\let\footnoterule\relax
\makeatother
\usepackage[activate=true]{microtype}
\pagestyle{main}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}
\raggedbottom
\begin{document}
\chapauthor{Christoper S. Chapman}
\chapter{Controlling Strategy}
\begin{multicols}{2}[\subsubsection*{Contents of this chapter}]
\printcontents{}{1}{\setcounter{tocdepth}{2}}
\end{multicols}
Norman 1965, Kaplan 1987 \\\lipsum[1]
Footnotes look like\footnote{Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste
natus error si. Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error,
si. Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error si.}
and\footnote{Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error si. Sed
ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error, si. Sed ut
perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error si.}.
\section{The relationship between management control systems and
strategy}
\lipsum[1]
\section{Any Relationship between management control systems and
strategy?}
\lipsum[1]
\section{No Relationship between management control systems and
strategy!}
\lipsum
\chapauthor{}
\tableofcontents
\end{document}
Best Answer
I think that you should try using either scrbook or the memoir document class. They are designed for this kind of work. IMHO Memoir has better documentation so you'll propably find it easier to configure it the way you want it.
There is also memdesign, which used to be part of the documentation of memoir.