I'm looking to reprint and publish older religious books from the 19th century and earlier.
Such books usually have features not typically found in most books, and I'm finding it difficult to manually reproduce them using plain LaTeX features.
Namely:
- The entire book is divided into multiple "books"
- Each book has a heading above its first chapter, similar to a chapter heading
- The
\title{}
of the entire book is also displayed above the first\book{}
heading - Certain paragraphs are numbered incrementally, similar to Bible verses
- Sometimes the "verse" markers are in the margin instead of inline with the text (not depicted below)
- Standard margin sizes for paperback books of e.g. 6" x 9"
To clarify point #3, if the overall book was called "Imitation of Christ", i.e. \title{Imitation of Christ}
, and was divided into 4 untitled "books" (i.e. via \book{}
), then the top of the first page with book content should say "Imitation of Christ", the next line should say "Book 1", the next line should say "Chapter 1".
To give a concrete example of all these points, take these two versions of the same page:
Are there any packages which specifically help with any of these, or ought they each to be solved manually using less specific packages?
I'm currently using memoir
and microtype
.
Best Answer
The
memoir
class provides automatically\book
and\chapter
divisions, so the main issue is setting up the formatting to the way you like them. Verses in the bible are functionally equivalent to sections, so you can use the\section
for your verses. But since you can rename commands easily, you can create a\verse
command that is\section
underneath, and keep the markup semantic.Here's a mockup of the Bible to get you started. Since it is likely that you will be using nice fonts, I would compile this with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, which allows you to use any OpenType or TrueType font on your system. (Make sure your source file is UTF-8 encoded.)
The standard
\book
command starts a new page, so you would need to change that appropriately. I haven't added anything for the header/footer, but you should be able to do that yourself by following thememoir
manual.The code the the margin number is adapted from the
memoir
manual. I have added code in the\printbooktitle
command to save the name of the book so that it can be reused in the\chapter
formatting. Finally by using\let\verse\section
we can keep the markup semantic:\verse
is now identical to whatever\section
.