Using LaTeX to keep a diary

Question

As the title implies, I would like to use LaTeX to keep a personal diary. I've been dumping my entries in a single file which has become unwieldy over time. Ideally I'd find a package (or collection of shell scripts) which assists me in maintaining a consistent directory structure and automatically headlining entries with their respective date.

I haven't found anything relevant in the CTAN repository, so I'm turning to you for advice. If there's no readily available solution, I might sit down and learn how to create custom packages.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

As you can't comment yet, here's a proposition using the tufte-latex class and a custom environment. This is just what I made up, you could edit your question to specify what format and features you would like. The lipsum package is just used for some dummy text.

\documentclass{tufte-book}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newenvironment{loggentry}[2]% date, heading
{\noindent\textbf{#2}\marginnote{#1}\\}{\vspace{0.5cm}}

\begin{document}


\begin{loggentry}{2009-Oct-31}{Snow}
    \lipsum[1]
\end{loggentry}

\begin{loggentry}{2010-Dez-31}{Water of Life}
    \lipsum[2]
\end{loggentry}

\begin{loggentry}{2011-Nov-15}{Cold}
    \lipsum[3-5]
\end{loggentry}

\begin{loggentry}{2012-Aug-24}{Sunrise}
    \lipsum[6-7]
\end{loggentry}

\end{document}

---

Edit 1: Here's an automated version. It assumes your directory to be of the form /Year/Month/Day.tex, formatted as e.g. 2012/Aug/24.tex, so the month is just the first three letters. The individual .tex files have only the requirement to have the first line as \mytitle{<The actual title here>}.

This solutions makes use of Peter Grill's answer to "How to iterate through the name of files in a folder".

The main file:

\documentclass{tufte-book}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{xifthen}

\newenvironment{loggentry}[2]% date, heading
{\noindent\textbf{#2}\marginnote{#1}\par}{\vspace{0.5cm}}

\def\?#1{}

\pgfmathtruncatemacro{\StartYear}{2008}
\pgfmathtruncatemacro{\EndYear}{2012}

\newcommand{\writetitle}{0}
\newcommand{\mytitle}[1]
{   \ifthenelse{\writetitle=1}{#1}{}
}

\newread\mysource

\begin{document}

\foreach \Year in {\StartYear,...,\EndYear}
{   \foreach \Month in {Jan,Feb,Mar,Apr,May,Jun,Jul,Aug,Sep,Oct,Nov,Dec}
    {   \foreach \Day in {1,...,31}
        {   \IfFileExists{\Year/\Month/\Day}
                {   \openin\mysource=\Year/\Month/\Day.tex
                    \read\mysource to \firstline
                    \closein\mysource
                    \xdef\writetitle{1}
                    \begin{loggentry}{\Year - \Month - \Day}{\firstline}    
                        \xdef\writetitle{0}
                        \input{\Year/\Month/\Day}
                    \end{loggentry} 
        }
        {   % files does not exist, so nothing to do
        }

        }  
    }
}

\end{document}

A sample log entry file:

\mytitle{Something happened}
\lipsum[3-5]

The Output: