[OS X TeX] Book in LaTex

[David Derbes]

Hi, Peter et al.

I think that the memoir class is certainly the right choice. Additionally, Lars Madsen who I think is maintaining the memoir class has been exceedingly helpful when I get stuck. The manual is a little intimidating but excellent. 

With six other people, I recently finished a massive 1200 page book that I think looks pretty good, all done in LaTeX with illustrations by Mathematica and Illustrator. You can see it (or bits of it) at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Sidney-Coleman-Quantum-Theory/dp/9814635502/

(Alas, the look inside uses the Kindle version, yecch. If you go to World Scientific, I think you can see the first chapter, which may give you an idea of the layout.)

It’s an obvious remark but I’ll make it anyway. You need a main file and then an included file for the title page, the preface, the foreword or introduction, (all this is front matter), the main matter (every chapter gets its own included file,
or do it any way you like), and then the back matter (appendices, acknowledgements, and so on). LaTeX will with the right incantations build you a nice Table of Contents and index (or several indices) and bibliography.

It wound be insanity to do this as one gigantic file. I also had a separate directory for all the illustrations, but they could have gone into the individual chapters, I guess. That seemed easier.

Good luck!
David Derbes
(recently retired from the Lab Schools, U of Chicago)


On Jan 16, 2020, at 5:39, Themis Matsoukas via MacOSX-TeX <macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu> wrote:

> 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}
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