[Tex/LaTex] How to write a book in LaTeX

books

I have taken a look at other questions, and I don't see any answer to my question. If this is a duplicate for some question I haven't seen, feel free to comment.

I am an experienced TeX user, I've been writing with TeX for about 3-4 years now. I am pretty good with TikZ too. The problem is, all that I have learned comes from one of my teachers that gave me packages so that I don't have much to worry about, and I never got in the technical stuff on my own (or at least never understood a thing of it).

I want to write a book, so I need to be able to deal with stuff like margins, labels, pagination, separating my TeX files into many files so that I don't have to compile the whole book each time I wanna remove/add a comma, etc. I am looking—not for a user manual that states what all commands do like a dictionary, because I know there are plenty out there and I have some—but rather like an introduction to using a book class, with examples and such. If you know what I'm talking about, the PGF-TikZ pdf is a great example of a such PDF ; it describes commands, yes, but there are plenty of examples and little commands are usually detailed while constructing a bigger example.

Best Answer

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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}

  5. Fill your files with content. This will take 99% of your time.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

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