On Jun 4, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Stacy Claxton wrote:
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.
Agree w/ Andy and Lars recommendation of Memoir.
The thing that I'd suggest in addition to this is that you work up
your design as a package (so after reading an introduction to LaTeX
(_The Not So Short Guide_ available at: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/gentle/gentle.pdf)
and the Memoir manual you'll also want to read the class guide: http://www.latex-project.org/guides/clsguide.pdf
and you should probably also get _The LaTeX Companion 2nd Ed._).
Also create a pair of packages one of which will include macros for
all typographic tweaks, the other of which includes definitions of
them which do nothing --- send authors the latter when returning a
manuscript.
You'll also likely want to configure fonts, for which your best option
is probably XeTeX (you'll be using it w/ LaTeX macros so it'll be
xelatex) and Will Robertson's nifty FontSpec package http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc/xelatex/fontspec/
though Philipp Lehman's Font Installation Guide is a wonderful
document and essential if you'll need to use pdflatex and Type 1 fonts.
Useful links to documentation:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-e-tex.html (my own list of free
references for LaTeX)
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/
William
--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
