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.