[OS X TeX] Book in LaTex

[Themis Matsoukas]

Hi Peter,

Congratulations on your resolution, I have written two books, both in latex, and I am itching to write more.  I use memoir as my standard document class for everything I do in latex unless a publisher provides a different class. It is very versatile and has many built-in styles. There are a few things you should consider before you start.

First, are you preparing the entire document yourself, or do you plan to give it to a publisher. If you work with a publisher you shouldn't spend too much time on your side because the publisher will transfer your book to their format.

If you are self-publishing, then you should spend some time planning the book design. Memoir has many built-in formats that you can switch between using the command \chapterstyle (see the attached preamble below).  

Personally I like the tufte style, which you can download from here:

https://tufte-latex.github.io/tufte-latex/

I like its general appearance and the idea of placing figures and footnotes on the margin. However, tufte is not easily customizable and for this reason I am now using memoir to emulate tufte's general look. 

The snippet below is my standard template for memoir documents. It is a standard format that places footnotes at the bottom and figures in the text. If you are interested in my tufte emulation I can send you the files off line.


I hope this helps,

Themis


%!TEX TS-program = pdflatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
%-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
\documentclass[11pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{amsmath, amsthm, amssymb}
\usepackage[round]{natbib}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage[colorlinks=true,citecolor=blue,linkcolor=blue,urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{enumitem}% to fix spacing in enumerate: \begin{enumerate}[noitemsep,topsep=0pt]
\usepackage{tmtex}% various personal customizations by tm
\myfonts

%---Begin LaTeX - Memoir customise-----------------------------------------* 
\pretitle{\centering\sffamily\huge}
\posttitle{\vskip 0.5em}
\maxtocdepth{section}   
\maxsecnumdepth{section} % number subsections
\pagestyle{ruled} %
	%also: empty, plain, headings, myheadings, simple, ruled, Ruled, 
	%also: companion, book, chapter, cleared, part, title, titlepage
\chapterstyle{bianchi}
	%also: default, section, hangnum, companion, article, reparticle
	%also: bianchi, brighthurst, brotherton, chappell, crosshead, culver, 
	%also: dash, demo2, demo3,  dowdingell, ell, ger, komalke, lyhne, madsen
	%also: ntglike, pederson,  southall, tandh, thatcher, veelo, verville, 
	%also: wilsondob
% favorites: 
	%      bianchi (*)
	%      thatcher (*) bug when \ref used inside \chapter
	%      southall
	%      chappell (?)
	%      dash
	%      ell
	%      ger
	%      veelo (seems to require pdfpages!?)
\renewcommand{\chapnamefont}{\normalfont\LARGE}
\renewcommand{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\LARGE}
\renewcommand{\chapnumfont} {\normalfont\LARGE}
\setsecheadstyle{\large\bfseries\raggedright} 
\setsubsecheadstyle{\normalsize\bfseries\raggedright}
%---End LaTeX - Memoir customize-------------------------------------------* 

\title{
\LARGE\em Title\\
\vspace{12pt}
\large Subtitle}
\author{
 Themis Matsoukas\\
 Department of Chemical Engineering\\
 Penn State University\\
}

%--------------------------------------------------------------------------* 
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}
\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat}
\bibliography{tm}

%--------------------------------------------------------------------------* 
\end{document}