[texhax] Designing books with LaTeX

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Fri Jun 6 11:46:47 CEST 2008



Stacy, there is a ready-rolled class called Memoir that has most
of what you need for a textbook. Of course there is also the LaTeX
standard book class, but this usually needs a bit of additional
programming to make it do what you want.

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:46:54 -0400
Stacy Claxton <sclaxton at scribenet.com> wrote:

> To Whom It May Concern:
> 
> I am familiar with LaTeX and have used it in the past to enter data and
> equations into a mathematical textbook. I have now been asked to create a
> design for a book. I know this involves using classes and packages, but I am
> not familiar with these. I have searched online documentation and have found
> vague references to designing your own class, usually with only some caution
> that it "is not a straightforward task, and is often best left to the
> professionals" or "typically involves a lot of work that is essentially
> programming and thus does not live easily with the declarative kind of
> design specification for a document (or range of documents) that would be
> produced by a professional typographic designer" or "although some
> parameters can be adjusted within a predefined document layout, the design
> of a whole new layout is difficult and takes a lot of time" (there's a
> footnote here suggesting that this is being addressed in the LaTeX3
> system?). This does not sound promising. I am a typesetter (I work in
> publishing and am very familiar with Quark and InDesign) but have no
> experience with design in LaTeX. Nor do I have extensive programming
> experience. How difficult would it be to learn how to use classes and
> packages to come up with a design? And how would I go about learning how to
> do this? Any feedback or suggested resources would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks, 
> Stacy Claxton 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
> Mailing list archives: http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/
> More links: http://tug.org/begin.html
> 
> Automated subscription management: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax
> Human mailing list managers: postmaster at tug.org


-- 
Use the source


More information about the texhax mailing list