10-17-2009, 08:41 PM | #1 |
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ἐγκώμιον: A (Xe)LaTeX Poetry Template
Please find attached a (Xe)LaTeX template intended for poetry or similarly short pieces of content. This is, perhaps, not entirely practical (given that most of the PDF crew probably reads novels and non-fiction rather than contemporary poetry), but I'm hoping it will illustrate that one can fairly easily take (Xe)LaTeX from bland defaults to something distinctly more.
The template is called ἐγκώμιον. Due to the fragile nature of the verse environment, in some cases the width of the environment must be explicitly specified to avoid unsightly line-breaks. For the same reason, it would probably be difficult to make large print eBooks with this template... but with some patience and fiddling it might be doable. Note: This is a XeLaTeX source file, so generating the PDF you need to do: Code:
xelatex filename.tex Code:
pdflatex filename.tex - Ahi Last edited by ahi; 10-17-2009 at 08:49 PM. |
10-18-2009, 03:40 AM | #2 |
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Forgive my curiosity, but why have you called it "encomion" in Greek, but transliterated it as "encomium" in English?
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10-18-2009, 07:23 AM | #3 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Doesn't the Greek "ἐγκώμιον" read "egkomion", or is gamma read as "n" before k?
Other than that, for extensive poetry typesetting I like the package "poetry", which is part of the "technica" suite. |
10-18-2009, 08:18 AM | #4 |
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Thanks for this, Ahi.
How hard would it be to modify it to use URW Garamond from the mathdesign LaTeX package, which is freely and widely available as part of most TeX distributions anyway? You lose some advanced features (e.g., access to Old Style numerals), but it would make it far easier for someone who doesn't have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on fonts! |
10-18-2009, 08:44 AM | #5 | |
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Thank you for putting this up here, I've had trouble with line breaks when trying to make PDF's out of text written in dactylic hexametre, hopefully this will fix that! It looks great, I can't wait to give it a go. |
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10-18-2009, 11:13 AM | #6 | ||||
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Encomium is the latin word, which I use when writing the name in the latin alphabet. i.e.: It's a translation instead of a transcription. Quote:
Quote:
However the XeLaTeX version can readily be used with any TrueType and OpenType fonts that you do have... which, if you have either Microsoft or Adobe products installed, you almost certainly have a few of at least (high quality ones, that is). If you are on windows systems (or can copy over .ttf and .otf fonts from your windows system to /home/user/.fonts/) try and see if you can get the template working with: - Palatino - Garamond - Adobe Garamond - Minion (or is it Minion Pro?) - Bembo (or is it Bembo Pro?) I'm sure others can suggest other good-to-high quality fonts that either ship with common software or are free to download. But even with this version, all you have to do, Frabjous, is to change at the top of the .tex file: Code:
\newcommand{\bookfont}{Garamond Premier Pro} Code:
\newcommand{\bookfont}{Palatino} Quote:
Code:
\begin{verse}[60mm] ... \end{verse} Make sure you try a few different widths... trying both smaller and greater... the poem should, obviously, be centered *visually* (not in terms of raw measurements) and until you've done it a few times, your instinct as to whether or not increase the width or decrease it might be off (unless of course you are increasing the width merely to get rid of unwanted line breaks). I will definitely be making another poetry template that maximizes the content area's width... so if encomium doesn't work out, stay tuned. - Ahi |
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10-18-2009, 04:40 PM | #7 | ||
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I actually don't think Garamond and Palatino look that much alike. I can easily tell them apart anyway, though perhaps either would look nice with your template. I wonder what it would like like with Linux Libertine, though, which I have as all three formats: True Type and Open Type and Type 1, and is a pretty nice looking font in that sort of family. I don't read a lot of poetry though, so I'm not sure that I'm going to get a lot of use out of this. Last edited by frabjous; 10-18-2009 at 04:44 PM. |
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10-18-2009, 07:32 PM | #8 | |
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I'll make a version for pdftex, which uses standard LaTeX fonts instead of truetype/opentype. Edit: I did not mean to suggest that Palatino and Garamond necessarily look alike. They are, however, probably the most common serif fonts that are aesthetically superior to the dread Times New Roman. - Ahi Last edited by ahi; 10-19-2009 at 07:41 AM. |
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10-19-2009, 07:05 AM | #9 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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10-19-2009, 06:49 PM | #10 | |
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- Ahi |
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10-20-2009, 08:42 AM | #11 | |
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10-20-2009, 08:58 AM | #12 |
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10-20-2009, 09:00 AM | #13 | |
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Yesterday I eventually opted to use the package dramatist for preparing színjáték, as I was unable to use technica together with memoir, and I also had no luck getting descent drama/play formatting at a 6" paper size. Though technica is certainly compelling... so I'll revisit it. I just hope it has better internationalization (or at least readily exposed ways to compensate for the lack thereof) than dramatist. Trying to set the language to Hungarian via babel, I had all sorts of untranslated strings and even weird artefacts left where no text should have appeared at all. - Ahi |
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