Making a daily devotional

Question

This question led to a new package:
scrjrnl

I'm searching for packages to write a daily devotional such as this one (Click "Search inside this book" and see in the end of the preview for example). I could not find a suitable package on the CTAN to do that.

I'm thinking that I could use a book or scrbook class and either redefine or encapsulate:

• \chapter for each month, resetting a counter for every day;
• \section for every day of the month, using and incrementing the counter.

What would be the best/easiest approach in this case?

• Making a devotional class to replace book;
• Writing macros to encapsulate \chapter and \section;
• Redefining \chapter and \section or playing with definitions used inside \chapter and \section calls in book or scrbook;
• Any other enlightened suggestion...

The usage I'm thinking about would look like this:

\documentclass{scrbook} % or \documentclass{devotional}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents

\month{January} % Set counter for month of January
\day*{} % Set a new day -- January 1, do not list in toc
\begin{verse}{Genesis 3.4}
% contents of the verse
\end{verse}
% commentary
% commentary
\begin{prayer}
% contents of prayer
\end{prayer}

\day*{} % Set a new day -- January 2, do not list in toc
% day contents

% etc.
\end{document}

Answer 1

Before you think of implementation, spend some time thinking of the structural and semantic elements of the book. From the example, I would structure the document as follows:

Structure

-- Collection
---- Devotional
------ Title
------ EpigraphTop
------ EpigraphBottom
------ Body
--------- Quote
--------- text
------- PresentationDate

By abstracting the sectioning elements a collection can represent a month or a week, if you wish. A devotional can represent daily text as requested or weekly chunks.

Author Commands

The next step would be to design the author interface. I would aim for:

\collection{January}
    \devotional
    \epigraph{...}
    \epigraph{...}
    body............
    ................
    \Quote{}
    ..............
    .............
    \enddevotional

Implementation

Alias : Chapter -> Collection
        Section -> Devotional

I would use the basic book class and create a package to handle the code. Use TikZ to draw the fancy boxes and the month marker at the beginning of the month at the upper right hand part of the page.

One of the difficulties I see here, is to get the right amount of words to fit everything per page. If you know TeX well, you might decide to make the body, as one command that you can box, measure it and unbox it to assist you writing the book. A good text processor that can count words might also be helpful.