A friend asked me if I knew any free software for creating dictionaries - which is good at saving space (reduce total number of pages).
Example:
I suppose this might be possible in LaTeX. Thankful for any suggestions or pointers.
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Sign up to join this communityA friend asked me if I knew any free software for creating dictionaries - which is good at saving space (reduce total number of pages).
Example:
I suppose this might be possible in LaTeX. Thankful for any suggestions or pointers.
I guess the sorting can be done with xindy
, glossaries
, luatex
or something else. And maybe the entrys should come from a database.
The following could be first approach for the layout. Please note that this is a draft only!
I used a narrow font to get as much as possible letters in one line
I added a macro to format the single entries. That makes later changes very easy.
I guess it would be a god practice to define more macros for other extras (like reference-signs etc.)
Chapter thumbs (german Daumenindex, actual letter in the margin) can be generated with TikZ and scrpage2
see http://www.komascript.de/node/200 for example.
Code
\documentclass[%
a5paper,
fontsize=7.5pt,
]{scrbook}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
% narrow font
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage[scaled=0.85]{helvet}
% layout
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{%
margin=1cm,
includehead,
includefoot
}
\usepackage{multicol}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\setlength{\columnseprule}{0.4pt}
\usepackage{scrpage2}
\clearscrheadings
\pagestyle{scrheadings}
\setheadsepline{0.8pt}
\setfootsepline{0.8pt}
\lehead{word}% first word on page
\rohead{word}% last word on page
\chead{W}% actual letter
\ofoot{\pagemark}
\setkomafont{pagehead}{\sffamily\bfseries}
\setkomafont{pagination}{\sffamily}
% entry command
% \dict{<word>}{<gender>}{<text>}
\newcommand{\dict}[3]{%
\par\vspace{0.25\baselineskip}
\textbf{\textsf{#1}} \textit{#2} #3
}
% testing
\usepackage{pgffor}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{3}
\foreach \n in {1,...,200} {%
\dict{word}{n}{Some text with mor explanations. Some text with mor explanations}%
}
\end{multicols}
\end{document}
Information
To get more information about using scrpage2
for head and foot see scrguien or scrguide in german. In the printed version (german) you can find even a tutorial about chapter thumbs.
\dict
in @Tobi's answer) as some form of sectional command (likesubsubsection
, say). Then it should be possible to use information contained in Chapters and verses of current page in header to update these running headers automatically via thetitlesec
package.