Whenever I search for LaTeX templates for books, theses (plural of thesis), lab reports and so on, I am often overwhelmed with hundreds of beautiful templates from which I have to choose just one.
However, when it comes to poetry anthologies, there is barely anything on the web (shock! horror!). I would have to build one from scratch using say, the memoir
class, poetrytex
or verse
. Of course, this can be vexing if you don't have much LaTeXing experience…
So I was wondering if you could build some clean and simple templates for poetry lovers to get started. Here is an example from the Oxford Book of English Verse to give you some ideas.
The poetry anthology should include:
- a title page
- table of contents
- poems
- index (arranged alphabetically by author's surname)
- options for setting indentations in the stanzas (see above and below links)
You could use this Tennyson poem as an example in your template.
Best Answer
I have never written poems, even with pencil, but I think that every
book
class is equally good as starting point to make a title page, table of contents and index. Which class to choose at this respect is mainly a matter of personal preference, IMHO. These are standard LaTeX procedures and there are hundreds of answers covering any possible problem and customization in these fields in this site.So the only problem I see is the "verse environment". If that of
memoir
of those from the cited packages for typesetting poetry (also existaltverse
orgmverse
in CTAN) does not provide a satisfactory results for you, try to learn to make your own environment (it's not as hard as it seem at the begining!).If I've understood your question, mainly what you want is a progressive indentation of each line the stanza. This is possible with the
parselines
package, as you can see in my MWE.I also added lettrines (so sloppy, I admit) fading colors and a few ornaments to the tile and ToC. This is not intended to be a good template,only to show that almost anything is possible with little effort starting with a general-purpose class (in this case,
octavo
).Note: Compile twice is you want to see the ToC.