LaTeX Book Template

A template for generating a book in LaTeX.

Requirements

pandoc
xelatex (included in TeXLive)
make

Getting started

This repository is a template for generating a trade paperback book. It creates a PDF that one can send to a printer for final production. As an additional feature, it generates a (very basic) EPub3 file to get you started on an ebook version.

To get going with this, copy the files in this repository to where you wish to work, modify the includes/variables.tex file to populate the title, author, and other information, add your content, and then run it using the following commands.

Running

There are several make targets available to you, depending on what you want to be generated:

make plain runs xelatex once
make toc runs xelatex twice. This is needed to regenerate table of contents and references with page numbers.
make draft generates a watermarked file for proofreading
make proof generates a full proofing file with frame and crop marks, a draft watermark, and on letter paper for margins
make final generates a final draft --- this is equivalent to make toc, except that it resets all draft stuff that may be left behind.
make ebook generates an EPub3 file. This will be exceedingly plain and not include any graphics, so you'll need to use something like Calibre to generate a final product, but this will get you started.

Additionally, there are a few targets which probably won't be used directly, but may be helpful:

The engage-letter target outputs to letter-size paper from the default trade paperback size. This only controls the paper size, not the layout size, though, so you will get a trade page centered in a letter page.
The reset target resets all switchable options (draft, letter paper, framing/crop marks) to production values.

Adding content

First things first, modify the includes/variables.tex file to contain the proper title, author, and additional information.

You may add content directly in the content directory as *.tex files, or you may write in Markdown in the src/content directory. If you wish to do this, each file in that directory will be transpiled from Markdown into LaTeX using pandoc. To generate these files, run make content.

You may add assets such as images in the assets directory to be included in your content. Note that file paths such as those used in \includegraphics should be relative to book.tex (that is, don't write \includegraphics{../assets/stuff.png}, but instead \includegraphics{assets/stuff.png}).

Once you have your content in your files modify book.tex to include each file in content with \input{} commands. The file in this repository includes example includes, and you'll probably want to remove those.

You'll likely want to edit includes/copyright.tex to match your needs.

Customization

The output of this template is deliberately bland, and is intended to be customaized.

Customize final page and layout size in includes/_geometry-trade.tex. This includes sensible defaults for margins and such already.
Customize fonts in includes/font.tex
Add hyphenation rules to includes/hyphenation.tex
Customize page layout (header, footer, etc) in includes/pagelayout.tex
Set a custom section divider in includes/secdiv.tex. This redefines the \rule command to be something more appealing. This is optional, though, and the \input{includes/secdiv} command in book.tex can be removed to restore defaults.
Customize your title and pretitle pages in includes/title.tex and includes/pretitle.tex

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