Typesetting a poem book for manual binding

Question

I would like to typeset a poem book, which I am planning to print then stitch and bind manually. My requirements are:

• The book should be printed on A4 paper, with two A5 pages on each side.
• It should be possible to set desired signature thickness (i.e. number of bifolios or leafs in each section)
• Small markings should be present in the middle of the innermost section bifolio for guiding the needles (and only there)
• Some configuration of markings can be chosen, or one can set desired distances or spacing beetween markings
• According to set section thickness, the pages will be in the reqired order. If the thickness is 2: 1. bifolio: leafs 1 and 8 on one side, leafs 2,7 on other; 2. bifolio: leafs 3,6 on one side, leafs 4,5 on the other (needle markings on the side containing leafs 4 and 5)
• some form of centering or manually shifting each poem's left margin should be present
• lettrine package capabilites within poems

I should probably write my own package to fulfill all of my requirements. Additional requirement for such a package would be:

• if possible, the package should be easily extended to any type of humanities books, not just poem books (for the same purpose of printing and manually binding)

I found verse to be simple and nice, but lettrine breaks inside verse.

I also would also like to have the options of poemscol to automatically generate a table of contents, an index of titles, and mark occasions when a stanza break falls at a page break. On the other hand, poemscol seems overly complex for my needs and also seems to be best suited for the particular purpose of typesetting critical editions.

I am providing images of some poems books which seemed nice to me:

I am also uploading a screenshot of InDesign pdf output:

I don't know any low level TeX commands. Where to start? What can be done (or, what can be without much pain)? What cannot be done (or, what can't be done without too much pain and effort)?

Pgfpages package seems to solve section/bifolio problems.

This question is important to me, and also seems quite complex. Therefore, I will be offering a bounty.

Answer 1

For your serious imposition needs, perhaps PDFtk could do the trick? Also, some higher-end printers support imposition, as I'm sure acrobat does (should you have access to it, or acrobat.com). The context wiki points to PDFjam for doing complicated impostion: http://freshmeat.net/projects/pdfjam/ or context supports a bunch of stuff out of the box: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Imposition such as:

ConTeXt has some built-in imposition schemas (see "arranging pages" in the manual):

2UP : 2 pages next to each other, n sheets arranged for a single booklet
2DOWN : 2 pages above each other, n sheets arranged for a single booklet
2SIDE : 2 pages per form, side by side in pagination order, single sided only (no real imposition, only paper saving)
2TOP : 2 pages above each other, single sided only
2TOPSIDE: 2 odd pages on one side, two even pages verso, above each other
2*2 : section: one sheet 2 x 2 pages = 4 pages (2 pages per form, for single sheets with front and back)
2**2 : section: one sheet 2 x 2 pages = 4 pages (2 pages per form, for book ordering)
2*4 : section: one sheet 2 x 4 pages = 8 pages (4 pages per form, 2x2 pages head to head)
2*8 : section: one sheet 2 x 8 pages = 16 pages
2*16 : section: one sheet 2 x 16 pages = 32 pages
2*4*2 : section of 16 pages: 2 sheets, 4 pages front and backside
2*2*4 : section of 16 pages: 4 sheets, 2 pages front and backside
XY : one sheet with x rows and y columns, you can control the number with \setuppaper[nx=...,ny=...,dx=...,dy=...]

For LaTeX, consider using the memoir package. The memoir manual is a great document, and explains a lot of page layout (and is good even if you are not using tex). It has a dedicated environment for poems. I have some code at home that I can post here later. The only problem I've had with LaTeX is getting PDF/X compliance for print on demand stuff. The manual has other good examples.

An example with memoir :

\documentclass[a5paper,10pt,twoside]{memoir}

\renewcommand{\PoemTitlefont}{%
\normalfont\scshape\flushleft% Remove centering from poem title
\hspace*{0.5\linewidth}\hspace*{-0.5\versewidth}}% Makes poem title flush left with body block.

\setlength{\afterPoemTitleskip}{0.7\onelineskip}% Changes the vertical space between the poem title and poem body

\title{A Collection of Fancy Poems}
\author{Some Guy}
\date{}

\checkandfixthelayout

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}
\newpage

\tableofcontents*
\thispagestyle{empty}
\newpage

\settowidth{\versewidth}{The longest line of your poem}
\PlainPoemTitle
\PoemTitle{Grass}
\begin{verse}[\versewidth]
first line
second line
third line fourth line
The longest line of your poem
and more and more and more 
and more
grass
\end{verse}
\newpage
\end{document}

For ConTeXt, set an environment and use the [spaces=yes] option. ConTeXt easily provides the PDF/X compliance, as well as doing imposition (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Imposition).

An example with ConTeXt

% PDF-X is this easy...
\setupinteraction
  [title=Some Title,
   subtitle=A Collection of Poems,
   author=Some guy,
   keyword=[{poetry, los angeles}]

\definehead[PoemTitle][section]
\setuphead[PoemTitle][number=no, page=yes]

\definelines[typing]
\setuplines[typing][space=yes]
\setupbackend[export=yes]
\starttext

\PoemTitle{A Great Poem Title}
\starttyping
My      Poem Looks    Like this
and it's    kind of silly when
                you
have to           read it
\stoptyping
\stoptext

Answer 2

You should take a close look at the octavo class.

Answer 3

This is not a complete answer at all; I just want to stress that organizing the pages as you want inside TeX or LaTeX might not be the right way to proceed, because you would have an unusable electronic version.

For this matter, you can produce a standard (a5paper say) ps file from LaTeX, then use the command pstops. For example,

pstops "12:11L(29.7cm,0)+0L(29.7cm,14.85cm),10R(-8.7cm,14.85cm)
+1R(-8.7cm,29.7cm),9L(29.7cm,0)+2L(29.7cm,14.85cm),8R(-8.7cm,14.85cm)
+3R(-8.7cm,29.7cm),7L(29.7cm,0)+4L(29.7cm,14.85cm),6R(-8.7cm,14.85cm)
+5R(-8.7cm,29.7cm)" toto.ps toto2.ps

(in one line) where toto.ps is an a5 paper file, will divide the pages by bundles of 12 (numbered from 0 to 11), and output an a4-paper-file toto2.ps containing six pages for each bundle, containing respectively pages 11 (on the left) and 0 (on the right), pages 10 and 1, pages 9 and 2, and so forth. Then a double side printing gives you the three sheets you can fold to get a 12-pages-booklet. One problem is that you may need to adjust the translation values like (-8.7cm,14.85cm) according to the margins of toto.ps. The pstops command is described for example here: http://gershwin.ens.fr/vdaniel/Doc-Locale/Outils-Gnu-Linux/PsUtils/pstops.html

Your other questions are out of my league, I guess.

Answer 4

I am not sure I understand the difficulty - I propose cutting this Gordian knot!

I once did a similar project, and did not bother with LaTeX page setup at all. I kept on to the usual A4 page size, and asked LaTeX to produce a dvi, which I then converted to PostScript.

The next step was to apply a PostScript page reorganization and scaling utility, which can do all you want and more. What I used is pstops. I believe it can do all you want.