[Tex/LaTex] Which package is best/easiest for a TeX newbie to lay out a book for print

bookscontextkoma-scriptmemoir

This question may be a little general and is subjective, but I am asking because I am not sure where my (limited) time should be invested for the problem I have to solve (I'll detail that in a moment).

I'm the technical guy for my wife's books that we are publishing (the print version is through Lulu). For her first book that we published, I created the layout in Pages.app and used styles to format it exactly as I wanted it to look. I've got measurements for the size of the page we designed for, the size of the margins and the placements of the header and footer, and can calculate the text block size. I know how far down on the page I want text to start appearing for new chapters. These are all specified as styles in Pages.

I know that I want to have a more flexible publishing process, because when we found some typos during the ebook production phase, I had to edit three different texts (the Pages document, our original source, and the ebook HTML). I want to have a single publishing system—and I see something TeXish as an intermediate output format for the print version (just as the HTML is an intermediate output format for the ePub and Mobi ebook versions). I can write all of the software that I need to take my input format (which will probably be a variant of Markdown) and transform it into a input file to XeTeX or LuaTeX—but I need to have something to write it into (or at least know how to write all of the bits that I need for the parts that I've got).

So far, I've been trying to decide between learning LaTeX + memoir, ConTeXt, or KOMA-Script. I've spent a few hours each with memoir and ConTeXt and as of yet haven't spent any time with KOMA. I'm looking for something with high ROI that lets me work with Unicode and my system TrueType fonts (the book is set in Baskerville). My goal is to re-typeset the original book using TeX so that I understand the process involved before trying to typeset the second book using a 'fill' process.

I like what I've played with, but I can't get a sense of which of these packages is going to give me the best result for the limited time that I have (working on my wife's book is sort of a second job). Remember: I'm also looking to reproduce a layout that I'm very happy with.

Thanks (and this is probably a good "Community Wiki" question).

Best Answer

I will answer the question from he point of view of ROI. I believe that with limited time your best bet will be to start with XeLaTeX and the basic book.cls.

Since you are willing to invest time in your own scripts and software the book.cls, will be easier to understand and modify, whereas XeLaTeX will allow the use of system fonts.

Moving from book.cls to memoir or koma can be as simple as changing the class (since they are both compatible) with the book class.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to put a musical clef in a memoir-class document

The Baskerville font does not contain the clef symbol according to the Apple character viewer. However, the Apple Symbols font does contain the character, so you can do the following:

% !TEX TS-program = XeLaTeX

\documentclass[msmallroyalvopaper,12pt,openany]{memoir}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}
\setmainfont{Baskerville}
\newfontfamily\symbolfont{Apple Symbols}
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textsymbol}{\symbolfont}


\begin{document}
\part*{1980}
\chapter*{Chapter One}
\section*{\textsymbol{𝄞}}
\end{document}

The reason the musixtex solution doesn't work is that it is using very old font commands (\bf, \rm, \it, etc.). Memoir prevents you from using these by default, but you can override it by passing the oldfontcommands option to the class.

[Tex/LaTex] Pocket book size for novel (10.8 x 17.5 cm)

The memoir class has its own set of macros for fixing the page layout, which differs from those of the geometry package.

The class has several pre-defined paper sizes, such as a4paper, letterpaper and b5paper. You can find them all (and what they mean) in the memoir manual. They are used as follows

\documentclass[b5paper]{memoir}

If you are not satisfied by the pre-defined sizes, then you can choose something different

\setstocksize{<height>}{<width>}
\settrimmedsize{\stockheight}{\stockwidth}{*}

You could have something like:

\documentclass{memoir}

\setstocksize{17.5cm}{10.8cm}
\settrimmedsize{\stockheight}{\stockwidth}{*}
\setlrmarginsandblock{1.2cm}{1.2cm}{*} % Left and right margin
\setulmarginsandblock{1.2cm}{1.2cm}{*}  % Upper and lower margin
\checkandfixthelayout 

\begin{document}

An awesome story...

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to put a musical clef in a memoir-class document

[Tex/LaTex] Pocket book size for novel (10.8 x 17.5 cm)

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