Advanced Typographic Control With Latex Document Classes

Customizing Document Classes

LaTeX document classes control the overall typographic design and layout of your document. The standard article and book classes offer basic functionality, but you may wish to customize them further or design your own classes focused on specific use cases. There are two main ways to customize document classes in LaTeX:

Modifying Existing Classes

You can modify existing document classes by creating a .cls file that specifies changes on top of the defaults. For example, to alter the standard LaTeX article class, you could create a myarticle.cls file that imports article.cls and then overrides certain parameters. Some common customizations include:

Page margins and text block width
Font family and sizes
Heading styles
Caption formatting
Reference formats (e.g. bibliography)

Modifying existing classes allows you to inherit functionality while tweaking the design for your purposes. However, substantial changes can become complex and make the class fragile. Creating a new class from scratch is preferred for major customizations.

Creating New Classes

For complete control over the document design, you can create an entirely new LaTeX class file. This involves specifying the document structure elements like:\

\documentclass{} options
Required packages (\usepackage{})
Page layout parameters
New commands, lengths, counters, etc.
Fonts, line spacing, sizing commands
Custom environments
formatted structural elements like \maketitle

Some examples of custom classes for specific document types include:

Specially formatted journal article classes
Thesis and dissertation classes
Formatting for book series
Company report templates

Creating a tailored document class requires expertise, but provides the greatest flexibility to craft a typographic design aligned to your content and audience.

Fonts and Typography

LaTeX offers powerful typographic control through its integrated font selection system and flexible approaches for typesetting textual elements. Key abilities related to working with fonts and typography in LaTeX include:

Font Packages

The LaTeX fonts system started with a limited set of fonts, but has grown to support a vast array of typefaces. This is accomplished by LaTeX font packages that enable new font families. For example, to use a Times Roman variant rather than the default Computer Modern face, you would add:

\usepackage{mathptmx}

There are font packages for serif, sans-serif, monospaced, and display faces. LaTeX font packages tap into system fonts or add support for additional outline and bitmap fonts. This allows you to use high quality OpenType fonts and get access to advanced typographic features.

Font Size and Styles

LaTeX offers commands for precisely selecting font sizes and styles within your document. This includes options like:

\tiny, \scriptsize, \footnotesize, \small, \normalsize, \large, \Large, \huge and more for predefined sizes.
\textbf{}, \textit{}, \textsc{} and other styles.
Math mode fonts with \displaystyle, \textstyle, etc.
Typeface selection like \sffamily (sans-serif), rmfamily (Roman), ttfamily (monospaced).

These allow close typographic control for textual semantics. Classes will set base sizes, but all fonts can be tuned contextually. For the highest quality, font size and spacing should be set with consideration to the output design and medium.

Line Spacing and Hyphenation

Consistent, well-spaced text improves readability. LaTeX provides spacing parameters like \linespread{1.05} to tune line height. The microtype package goes further with letterspacing and font expansion.

LaTeX also does automatic hyphenation by default. For the best line breaks across paragraphs, explicitly enable languages with packages like \usepackage[english]{babel}. The resulting quality of formatting enhances textual flow.

Page Layout

LaTeX handles automated page layout as part of its formatting model, but provides control knobs to tailor the design. Key page parameters that impact the text block and overall look include:

Page Dimensions

The physical dimensions of the printed page are set using the \paperwidth and \paperheight lengths. These establish the bounding box and implicitly handle scaling if the output medium (PDF, print, etc.) differs. You can also use the geometry package to set lengths like \textwidth and \textheight for the written content region.

Margins and Textblock

Page margins visually frame content and impact line lengths. LaTeX defines lengths like \oddsidemargin, \evensizemargin, \topmargin and \headheight to tune positioning. For convenience, the geometry package lets you set margins explicitly with directives like:

\geometry{left=2cm,right=1cm}

Combined with text block parameters, precise control over horizontal width and vertical spacing provides flexibility needed for typesetting books, academic papers, posters and more.

Headers, Footers and Page Numbering

LaTeX provides a default formatted header with document title and number, as well as centered page numbers in the footer. These structural elements can be modified globally or per-page. For example, fancyhdr lets you redefine:\

\pagestyle{fancy} - Enable new header format
\lhead{} \chead{} \rhead{} - Left/Center/Right header contents

This framework handles visual consistency and saves effort when tuning headers across document sections or long papers spanning multiple pages.

Advanced Formatting

LaTeX shines for semantic markup that conveys structure, allowing you to focus on content while the system handles rendering details. At the same time, LaTeX provides ways to manually tune visual styles at a high level of precision when needed. We will cover some advanced constructs that enable manual overrides for visual layout.

Columns

Multi-column layouts provide flexibility within the bounds of a page. LaTeX supports column typesetting with the multicol package. For example:

\begin{multicols}{3}
  % Three columns of text  
\end{multicols}

This approach allows changes in columns per section as needed. Balance across columns is automated, but manual column breaks can customize segmentation as well.

Colors

The color/xcolor packages introduce commands like \color{red} and \textcolor{blue}{} for applying color during typesetting. Colors defined can be used for:

Text fonts
Background shading
Lines, frames and rules
Links and other active areas

Used judiciously, color can enhance wayfinding, connections, or important areas without compromising legibility.

Floats and Figures

LaTeX offers automated handling of floats - content like figures and tables that convey information adjacent paragraphs but have independent positioning rules. Floats avoid unsightly gapping from forced placement, instead shifting flexibly within margins and column boundaries. This improves consistency of textual flow.

Key float parameters provide control over sizing, labeling, positioning dependencies, list of figures generation and override options. Mastering floats allows seamless integration between visuals and the narrative text.

Tables

Tables organize complex information sets into compact visual structures, but also pose tricky formatting issues spanning multiple pages potentially. The tabular environment manages alignment, spacing consistency and table markup automatically so content creators can focus on underlying data relationships.

Advanced table construction techniques like multi-page tables, merged columns and rows, image inclusions, and programmatic construction from data enable broad use for communication, reference, analytics and more.

Debugging and Troubleshooting

Compilation issues are common when learning LaTeX's vast array of packages and commands. Diagnosing errors is key to achieve document build stability essential for production typesetting. We will cover techniques that smooth workflows and accelerate rectification of problems.

Common Issues

When a LaTeX build fails, the log provides an error that localizes the issue at the line level. Beyond syntax problems, some other frequent error causes include:

Incorrect environments like a missing \end{}
Unsupported font packs or names
Undefined lengths, labels and other identifiers
Problematic packages clashes
Missing files for image inclusion

With practice identifying root causes, error messages can guide fixes without need to seek external help in most cases.

Debugging Tools

LaTeX editors provide GUI views into the build and compilation process, highlighting issues visually. For example, missing labels for section references show up as warnings, helping detect subtle consistency issues early. Integrations like continuous preview mode update in real-time as you edit the underlying code.

More advanced developer-style techniques are also available. For example, temporarily switching error handling modes to stop on each problem can help isolate cascading issues. The layouts package visualizes box boundaries, dimensions and other metrics for diagnosing spacing or positioning problems.

Best Practices

Some recommended practices help avoid errors entirely:

Build documents step-by-step instead of all at once.
Structure documents with consistent, standardized naming and organization.
Double check package documentation for compatibility information.
Learn to read log output - clues about margin overflows, skipped elements, etc.

Applying discipline, you can eliminate recurring issues. But LaTeX's vast capabilities means edge cases continue to surprise even experts until the very end!

Example Document Class

We will conclude by walking through an annotated custom document class for formatting a high quality book. This will tie together the key concepts covered in this guide.

Document Structure

We design the class for 6 x 9 inch trim size paperback books. Each chapter title starts on a recto (right-hand) page. Front matter sections use Roman numerals and recto/verso side conventions establish visual hierarchy.

\ProvidesClass{mybook}

\LoadClass[twoside]{book} % Use LaTeX book defaults

\newcommand{\blankpage}{
  \newpage
  \thispagestyle{empty}
  \quad
  \newpage
}

Required Packages

We import needed functionality, fonts and set base font sizes to 22pt for titles and 11pt body text:

\RequirePackage{mathptmx} % Times font
\RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}  
\RequirePackage{geometry} % Layout settings
\RequirePackage{fancyhdr} % Custom headers

\newcommand{\MyFontSizeI}{22pt}
\newcommand{\MyFontSizeII}{11pt}

Custom Commands

Helper commands automate typesetting of special pages and recurring elements:

% Chapter title pages
\newcommand{\MyTitlePage}[1]{
  \thispagestyle{empty}  
  \vspace*{\fill}
  \begin{center}
    {\MyFontSizeI \bfseries #1 \\} % Title 
  \end{center}
  \vspace{\fill}
  \blankpage
}

% Part pages  
\newenvironment{MyPart}[1]
  {\blankpage
   \thispagestyle{empty}
   \begin{center}
     {\MyFontSizeI \bfseries #1}
   \end{center}}
  {\blankpage}

Additional customization like header content, table styles and bibliographic formatting can be added modularly based on specific book requirements.