jwjournal
, a personal LaTeX class for writing journalsPackage dependencies:
enumitem
,einfart
,minimalist
,needspace
,projlib
,tcolorbox
.
A typical journal entry produced by jwjournal
looks like this:
Codewise, it is as simple as below:
2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
Today I visited the botanical garden!
[Food] And had *ice cream* for lunch!
>>> This botanical garden has a history of nearly two hundred years, take a look at this photo:
|| <0.40> {example-image}
(( <0.45> {example-image-a}
<- <5>
)) <0.50> {example-image-b}
<- <5>
(( <0.45> {example-image-c}
It is also possible to write the date with other separators, such as
2023/01/01
or2023.01.01
.With the options
month-day-year
orday-month-year
, you can also write date in the formatmm-dd-yyyy
ordd-mm-yyyy
, respectively. You may refer to the English, French and German demo documents for examples.
Every day of the week has its unique color, like this:
By the way, the conversion from plain date string like 2023-01-01
to natural language like January 1, 2023 ⬦ Sunday
is done by jwjournal
automatically and has multilingual support. Thus, for example (via \UseLanguage
):
The structure of the document is very simple:
\documentclass[11pt, paperstyle = light yellow, color entry, use indent = false]{jwjournal}
\UseLanguage{⟨language⟩} % For English this line can be omitted.
\begin{document}
% Your journal
\end{document}
The available class options include:
month-day-year
or day-month-year
for using other date format;paperstyle = ...
adjusts the paper color, choices include: light yellow
, yellow
, parchment
, green
, light gray
, gray
, nord
, dark
...color entry
adds more color to the title of each entry;scroll
turns the scroll mode on, which generates a single-page pdf similar to a long screenshot.There are also some relevant options provided by the base class of
jwjournal
:
use indent = false
: disable the paragraph indentation and add some space between each paragraph instead.use style = ⟨provided style⟩
: select the designing style of the current article; for our purpose here, it is recommended to use the styleclassical
(with this the optionuse indent = false
is added by default), together with the optionstitle in boldface
andtitle in sffamily
, see the comment below regarding the usage of "Section".You may refer to the demo documents to see their actual usage.
Here are the major syntaxes for your main text: 1) Title
2023-01-01
or 2023/01/01
would be regard as the Title line. 2023-01-01 Sunny | Apartment
With the options
month-day-year
orday-month-year
, you can also write date in the formatmm-dd-yyyy
ordd-mm-yyyy
, respectively. You may refer to the English, French and German demo documents for examples. 1) Note
[Note]
would be regard as the Note line. [Note] In hindsight, it was the right decision.
The space(s) between [Note]
and the text following it would be ignored.
You may also use
【
and】
, which is especially useful when writing Chinese. 1) Emphasis
*⟨text⟩*
is emphasizing;**⟨text⟩**
is bolding;***⟨text⟩***
is bolding and emphasizing.>>>
, its usage is like the >
in Markdown for blockquote.
1) Image|| <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩}
or || {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>
: show image in the middle.(( <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩}
or (( {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>
: show image on the left.)) <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩}
or )) {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>
: show image on the right.
The
<⟨width⟩>
is optional. Here⟨width⟩
is a number like0.75
, the unit is\linewidth
. When<⟨width⟩>
is not given, the width would be full\linewidth
. 1) Code Due to the current method of implementation, it is unfortunate that one cannot directly insert source code in the document. There are some workarounds though, as described below.
`⟨code⟩`
, similar to the Markdown syntax. However, be aware that special characters need to be escaped, for example, \
should be written as \textbackslash
, {
should be written as \{
, %
should be written as \%
, etc.1) Section
## {⟨section title⟩}
;### {⟨subsection title⟩}
;#### {⟨subsubsection title⟩}
.If you wish to use the numbered version, write ##+
, ###+
and ####+
instead.
It is recommanded to use the class option
title in boldface
,title in sffamily
anduse style = classical
(these options are provided by the base class ofjwjournal
). If you also wish your section title to be in small caps shape, then you may put the⟨section title⟩
in\textsc
.
1) Subfile
.tex
files named after each month.:: {⟨file name⟩}
for input, similarly as \input
.::: {⟨file name⟩}
for include, similarly as \include
.
Explicitly, these are
\InputJournal
and\IncludeJournal
. If in the preamble you wish to define some automatic processing involving input or inclusion of subfiles, please use these two commands.
With a few more for icing on the cake:
|
: The first vertical bar would be interpreted as \hfill
. This allows you to write the title line as
2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
and then the address Botanical Garden
would be printed at the end of the title line.
\\
and //
: \\
has its usual meaning in LaTeX for starting a new line, while //
has been defined to be starting a new line with some vertical spacing. This allows you to write the annotations as:
[Note] Some text.
//
More text.
//
(Some remark)
\\
(Another remark)
\\
(Final remark)
As a result, all the text would be properly indented.
Note that images specified via
||
,((
or))
already contain line breaks, thus you don't need to (actually, you can't) write//
or\\
around them.
>>
: Text after >>
would be centered. This is intended for writing annotations/captions for displayed images:
|| {image-name}
>> (Some remark)
>> (Another remark)
~~
: If you use >>
or >>>
inside a Note block (i.e. lines start with [...]
), then there would no way to get out of the centered or boxed area and then continue the indented text; in such cases, you may start a new paragraph that start with ~~
, this will continue the indented text block:
[Test] Here is some text.
|| {some-image} <.4>
>> (Centered text)
~~
Some more text.
>>> Text in color box.
~~
And more text.
->
and <-
: Skip or retrieve certain vertical space, by default half of \baselineskip
. You may specify the exact spacing in the unit of \baselineskip
: for example, -> <0.3>
would be skipping 0.3\baselineskip
, while <- <.75>
means retrieving 0.75\baselineskip
.---
: Three or more hyphen chars -
in a separate paragraph would be interpreted as a separation line (as with Markdown).+++
: If a single sentence or a few words fall to the next page, you may write a +++
before that entry to enlarge the current page by one line.
You may write this
+++
several times if necessary, but do make sure that the number of the+
sign is a multiple of 3.
===
: Three or more equal signs =
would simply be ignored. This is for improving the readability of the code, allowing you to write your journal like:
2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
===================================
Today I visited the botanical garden!
[Food] And had ice-cream for lunch!
You may also refer to the demo documents to see their behaviors in action.
And don't forget that you are still using LaTeX! Thus if the provided syntax does not satisfy you, there are always LaTeX commands as a fallback.
Indentations are not important, but paragraphs need to be separated by a blank line. For the sake of readability, it is recommended to organize your text as one of the following ways:
with indentation:
2023-01-01
Sunny | Botanical Garden
......
......
with a separation line:
2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
===================================
......
......
or maybe even:
==========
2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
==========
......
......
minimart
.einfart
.If you are using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to compile your document, then the current document class requires the following open-source fonts that are not included in the standard TeX collection:
It is recommended to download the Super-OTC version, so that the total download size would be smaller, and the installation would be easier.
These are necessary if you wish to write your document in Chinese (either simplified or traditional) or Japanese. Also, without these fonts installed, the compilation speed might be much slower — the compilation would still pass, but the system shall spend (quite) some time verifying that the fonts are indeed missing before switching to the fallback fonts.
The colors from Monday to Sunday have the internal names jwjournal-color-1
, ..., jwjournal-color-7
. Currently they are defined as:
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-1 } { yellow!50!green }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-2 } { yellow!70!orange }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-3 } { cyan!70!blue }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-4 } { violet }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-5 } { yellow!40!cyan }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-6 } { yellow!20!orange }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-7 } { red!20!orange }
The main features are achieved with the power of LaTeX3's regex functionality. It scans the content paragraph by paragraph and converts recognized patterns into corresponding TeX commands. Thus, 2023-01-01 Weather
becomes \JWJournalEntry{2023-01-01}{Weather}
, [Note] ...
becomes \item[Note] ...
inside a description
environment, and +++
is essentially \enlargethispage{\baselineskip}
, etc. However, this comes with a price: in order to scan the content, it is firstly stored in a macro \g_jwjournal_content_tl
, and that means that you cannot use commands like \verb
in your main text (unless explicitly \end{jwjournal}
, write your code, and then \begin{jwjournal}
).
Also, synctex won't work properly.
The conversion of date string to natural language, and the calculation of the day of the week are accomplished by projlib-date
, part of the ProjLib
toolkit, which is still at its early stage, in some aspects not as functional as existing package such as datenumber
, but should evolve through time.
Language and date format can both be set in two ways: as class option or with corresponding commands.
\UseLanguage
, provided by projlib-language
; the one for setting date format is \SetDatetimeInputFormat
, provided by projlib-date
.\UseLanguage
, it would load all the language settings and then switch to your selected one. Sometimes the page breaking behavior differs slightly. Personally I prefer the \UseLanguage
approach, for this would allow you to switch language in the middle of your document.The scroll mode is achieved by directly accessing \pdfpageheight
(pdfTeX and XeTeX) or \pageheight
(LuaTeX). The minimal page height is set to be 10in
. It is worth noting that in order to calculate the height needed, the entire content are put into a single box, which puts a limitation on the length of your document (but this usually wouldn't be a problem).
The author would like to thank his friend Junzhuo Zhao for his valuable help with the German language. Danke schön!
This work is released under the LaTeX Project Public License, v1.3c or later.