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Can anyone suggest a good way of formatting minutes from business meetings?
[Update:] I'm particularly looking for an easy way to have an 'action items' column at the right side, and possibly a left-most agenda column — much like printed minutes' books do.
One good way is to use the minutes package. For a simple meeting though it maybe a bit of an overkill.
multirow and manual line-breaks would be a disaster.
Jan 28, 2012 at 8:31
Sample.tex file from the minutes package. It does not include any examples of "columns" to the left or right of the main text.
Jan 28, 2012 at 8:39
I created the following by modifying various other examples I found. It provides three columns in a table (Item, Notes and Action) with line-wraps within each table cell.
\documentclass[a4wide,10pt]{extarticle}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\setlist{noitemsep}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\titlespacing*{\section}{0pt}{6pt}{6pt}
\titlespacing*{\subsection}{0pt}{6pt}{6pt}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{center}
\textbf{Example Industries\\Monthly Meeting Minutes}
\vspace{0.33cm}
\end{center}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{| m{2.8cm} | m{13.6cm} |} \hline
\textbf{Date and Time} & Saturday 02 June 2012 at 12:00 \\ \hline
\textbf{Venue} & Meeting Room \\ \hline
\textbf{Participants} & A. Nother, A. N. Other \\ \hline
\textbf{Apologies} & Y. A. N. Other \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\subsection*{Minutes of the Meeting}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{| m{1.8cm} | m{12.6cm} | m{2cm}|} \hline
\textbf{Item} & \textbf{Notes and Discussion} & \textbf{Action} \\ \hline
Matters Arising & The water-cooler is still broken. & \textbf{A.N.} \\ \hline
Progress on Projects & The large project is up and running and should be completed by the end the month. However, the smaller project has not yet started and has been placed on hold for now. The tiny project is complete and should start generating results this week. & \textbf{A.N.O.} \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\subsection*{\color{red}{Next Meeting: Friday 08 June 2012 at 12:00.}}
\end{document}
Here's a screenshot of the rendered document:
Use Emacs' org-mode with a relative timer on description lists (type C-c C-x - in an org buffer to start and M-<RET> to insert a new item). Once finished export the buffer to LaTeX, or directly to PDF.
Regardless of the latex packages you use, I would use emacs or another editor that is highly script-able so that I could have a keystroke enter the current time for you. For an example of how to do this, our big-sister site is much better source. See for example here
\time which is defined as the time that elapsed since midnight in hours. But as you probably want to also get the seconds that elapsed you will need to use \pdfcreationtime. There is a big advantage in using a good customized class for minutes as they are normally highly structured documents.
Dec 16, 2010 at 10:30
\time give you the time at which the document was compiled? Whereas I suspect that for minutes you want the time at which the sentence was written, and I can't see how TeX can detect that without being told.
Dec 16, 2010 at 10:33