Disclaimer: I'm a complete newb at LaTeX. I'm a programmer, used to writing documentation in Markdown, so when I decided to make a book for my wife, LaTeX appealed to me because I can focus on the text first, and not use a heavy word processor, etc.
I want to make a "memories" book that will have three very distinct styles in it:
- Chapters that look like an email newsletter that we used to send out
- Chapters that are basically photo albums
- A section containing chapters that look more like a traditional book or novel: a collection of short stories
The first two would be alternating: basically the first half of the book would be "newsletter", "photo album", "newsletter", "photo album", and so on ... mimicking an email newsletter we sent to family in our first few years of marriage. Then the second half of the book would be a collection of short stories - with barely any pictures.
I've written a couple hundred pages of content, using a basic book format from a LaTeX quickstart, and it's making a PDF. But now I want to start actually doing the book design ... but I can't find where to start. Here are some of the questions I have:
- How do I start making a custom style for the newsletter-style sections of the book? I've included a screenshot below of a mockup of the style, but here are the basic points:
- It will probably use different typesetting than the rest of the book to make it "feel" more like an email newsletter than a book
- It needs to have a two-column layout (as seen in pic) - main column, and then a sidebar with smaller callout boxes of content, but then be followed by a one-column layout again for the remainder of the "email". Where can I find advice on making a custom layout like that?
- Would you even produce this as one book in LaTeX? Or should I produce it as separate PDFs that I just join together before sending to the printer? (likely using Lulu if that makes a difference, although open to suggestions there, too)
Thanks!
Example of the "newsletter" style used in parts of the book:
\section*{Some Newsletter Heading}
. I'll look into TikZ and paracol. – Jeremy Thomerson Mar 11 '18 at 20:56