[ahi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Forgive my curiosity, but why have you called it "encomion" in Greek, but transliterated it as "encomium" in English?

Your curiosity is not only forgiven, but applauded!

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.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Other than that, for extensive poetry typesetting I like the package "poetry", which is part of the "technica" suite.

ἐγκώμιον is meant for poetry eBooks that wish to offer the content with a certain visual aesthetic. (And, of course, the corner.png graphics in the zip file can be easily replaced with other corner decoration. As can the patriarchal cross.)

Originally Posted by frabjous

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!

It wouldn't be difficult at all, frabjous. I might just make a version like that of it soon (a pdftex compilable version, to be technical).

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:

\newcommand{\bookfont}{Garamond Premier Pro}

to

\newcommand{\bookfont}{Palatino}

or whichever other font you wish to try to compile with.

Originally Posted by Latinandgreek

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.

Due to the narrowness of the content area (made worse by the decorative corners) manual overriding of the width may be necessary for the verse environment:

\begin{verse}[60mm]
...
\end{verse}

I'm assuming that dactylic hexametre should be of a fairly constant line-width... so once you find the right width, it should be fine for the poem from beginning to end on all pages.

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