It’s been forever since I’ve contributed to the Humanities Dissertation Project, I fear. I have something big in the background that I’m preparing toward it, but I thought I’d take advantage of my recent presentation of part of a chapter for the American Cultures workshop to include some handy (Xe)LaTeX tips I picked up.
The biggest irritation I had with the memoir class was that, for some reason, it was doublespacing my footnotes when I used the \DoubleSpacing command. I figured out how to stop that: I erased the line for \VerbatimFootnotes. I’m not sure why I enabled that command in the first place, but I certainly don’t need it for now. I also took advantage of the titlepage examples in memoir to spiff up my title a bit. I thought it was too big and started too far down the page.
I used the \vskip command to make a whitespace break in between thoughts. You call this command by typing something like this:
\vskip 20pt
It took me forever to get it to work, since I kept putting the measurement in either braces or brackets.
Furthermore, I made a few macros to speed up typing. For example,
\newcommand{\usa}{\textit{U.S.A.}}
made it so that I could just type \usa\ when referring to the trilogy by Dos Passos.
Further, I wanted a set of figures arranged in a table, but treated as separate figures (and numbered as such). The memoir manual helped here, and I basically had a 3×4 matrix that looked, per row, like this:
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{mac.png}}
\caption{Mac} \label{mac}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{janey.png}}
\caption{Janey} \label{janey}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{j-ward-moorehouse.png}}
\caption{J. W. Moorehouse} \label{moorehouse}
\end{minipage}
\newline
This was far easier than I expected it to be. The {!} means to auto-scale the graphic to fit the width while adjusting the vertical appropriately.
Finally, I had the yucky task of formatting part of The Big Money. It didn’t come out perfectly, as the \vinphantom is not working properly and the two instances of [{\ldots}] are misaligned, but here is the text I used:
\begin{quotation}\SingleSpacing
``Comrades, let's sing,'' Don's voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:
\begin{center}{\itshape Arise ye prisoners of starvation {\ldots}}
\vskip 30pt
\Large {\itshape Newsreel LXVI}
\vskip 15pt
\normalsize HOLMES DENIES STAY
\vskip 10pt
{\itshape A better world's in birth}
\end{center}
Tiny Wasps Imported from Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle
\vskip 10pt
{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}
\begin{center}
Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals
\vskip 10pt
{\itshape Arise rejected of the earth}
\vskip 10pt
\textsc{paris brussels moscow geneva add their voices}
\begin{verse}
\begin{center}
{\itshape It is the final conflict}\vinphantom{ his}\\
\vinphantom{It }{\itshape Let each stand in his place}
\end{center}
\end{verse}
Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days
\vskip 10pt
{\itshape The International Party}
\vskip 10pt
SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE
\vskip 10pt
{\itshape Shall be the human race.}
\end{center}
{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}
\begin{center}
\Large {\itshape The Camera Eye (50)}
\end{center}
\OnehalfSpacing
\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}have\hspace{1 em}clubbed\hspace{1 em}us\hspace{1 em}off\hspace{1 em}the\hspace{1 em}streets\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}are\hspace{1 em}stronger\hspace{1 em}they are rich\hspace{1 em}they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors {\ldots} they hire the men with guns\hspace{2 em}the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
all right you have won\hspace{1 em}you will kill the brave men our friends tonight
there is nothing left to do\hspace{1 em}we are beaten\hspace{1 em}we the beaten crowd together\cite[1155–1156]{usa}
\end{quotation}
You can see the results here. And a shortened version of the .tex file, which generates the pdf, is available here.
Tags: John Dos Passos, LaTeX, memo
Leave a Reply