My girlfriend is teacher at primary school, she's new using LaTeX and she needs to make a "cute document" for kids, but I don't know how change the following items to make them look nice for the kids:
I made a humble attempt of a cute document with memoir and some Inkscape graphics. :) Please bear with me, after all, cuteness is in the eye of the beholder. :)
Spoiler alert:
! Don't laugh at my duck, please.
Jake and I were talking in the TeX and friends chatroom a few months ago about funny chapter styles for memoir. For the fun of it, we made a theme based on Super Mario Bros. I drew Mario and a goomba:
Later, we added a feature that added as many goombas as the chapter number - Chapter 3 would have three goombas, and so on.
Jake made an awesome Yoshi code that extended his tongue to fill the line:
Sadly, the code is not available, for obvious reasons: Nintendo wouldn't be happy. After all, those characters are copyrighted. What we did was just a humble case study of "different" styles for documents based on memoir.
That said, I think we could use some ideas from this "exercise". I drew two elements in Inkscape, a flower and a duck:
I then exported both images to a tikzpicture via a nice plugin called inkscape2tikz. This step is not mandatory, after all, we can simply print those images to a vector format - say, .pdf - and include them as images (it's way easier).
In order to make our lives easier, I created a new package called duck:
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{duck}[2012/18/07 Duck style for memoir]
\RequirePackage{graphicx}
\RequirePackage{xcolor}
\RequirePackage{tikz}
\RequirePackage{xspace}
\definecolor{cffffff}{RGB}{255,255,255}
\definecolor{cffcc00}{RGB}{255,204,0}
\definecolor{c008000}{RGB}{0,128,0}
\definecolor{caa8800}{RGB}{170,136,0}
\definecolor{cd4aa00}{RGB}{212,170,0}
\definecolor{ce6e6e6}{RGB}{230,230,230}
\newcommand{\drawduck}{%
... TikZ code here ...
}
\newcommand{\drawflower}{%
... TikZ code here ...
}
\newcounter{myflowers}
\newcommand{\flowers}[1]{%
\setcounter{myflowers}{-1}\loop\stepcounter{myflowers}\ifnum\value{myflowers} < #1 \drawflower\repeat%
}
\makechapterstyle{weloveducks}{%
\chapterstyle{default}
\renewcommand*{\chapnamefont}{\color{olive}\bfseries\HUGE}
\renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\hfill\bfseries\HUGE}
\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\chapnamefont\thechapter\xspace\flowers{\thechapter}}
\renewcommand*{\printchaptertitle}[1]{%
\drawduck\bfseries\HUGE\hfill ##1%
}}
The TikZ code is huge. The full sample duck.sty file is available here.
Now, let's go to our .tex file. I opted to use a system font, so I went with xelatex. I don't like to change \parskip, \parindent and line spacing, but I thought that for this particular document, some adjustments would make the text easier to be read by a kid.
\documentclass[14pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Segoe Print}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}
\usepackage{duck}
\begin{document}
\chapterstyle{weloveducks}
\setlength{\parskip}{1.5\baselineskip}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\OnehalfSpacing
\chapter{The journey begins}
Hi, I am a duck. Quack!
\kant[1]
\chapter{The journey continues}
\kant[2]
\chapter{The journey ends}
\kant[3]
\end{document}
The output:
This is surely the most clumsy duck drawing ever in the history of duck drawing. :)
Note that the number of flowers grow together with the chapter counter. Kant text is provided by kantlipsum. And memoir is awesome, as always. :)
Hope you guys like it. :)
