simplivre : write you books in a simple and clear way

New documentations are still being written. For now, only the core code is included in TeX Live 2024 and MiKTeX (old documentations have been removed from the distribution).

simplivre is a LaTeX class for typesetting books, which has a simple and clear design.

Currently, it has native support to Chinese (simplified and traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Russian and Spanish typesetting. And it may compile with either XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX.

This is part of the minimalist class series.

Package dependencies: amsfonts, caption, ctex, draftwatermark, embrac, float, fontspec, geometry, graphicx, lua-widow-control, indentfirst, mathpazo, minimalist, nowidow, parskip, projlib, regexpatch, silence, tikz-cd, unicode-math, wrapfig2.

Features

Compared with usual document classes, it has the following features:

• Several carefully designed styles.
• Native multilingual support: Chinese (simplified and traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Russian and Spanish.

In particular, for simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Japanese, the fonts of the corresponding glyphs can be automatically switched.

• Ready-to-use theorem-type environments, with clever referencing supported.
• Support both the standard and the AMS writing fashion.
• ... and much more...

To get started

Prepration:

• Make sure that your TeX distribution is up-to-dated.
• Check the required fonts indicated below, and make sure that they are installed.

Once prepared:

• You may get started by looking at one of the demo documents that suits your need and edit the code there to get your own template.

If you run into a problem, or if you would like some elements to be changed or improved:

• Feel free to raise an issue or post a feature request via the GitHub issue.

Required fonts

The current document class requires the following open-source fonts that are not included in the standard TeX collection:

• The Source Han font series at Adobe Fonts. More specifically:
  • Source Han Serif, go to its Release page.
  • Source Han Sans, go to its Release page.
  • Source Han Mono, go to its Release page.
  > It is recommended to download the Super-OTC version, so that the download size would be smaller.

Improvements to the current font configuration

The code in this section is rather experimental and may constantly get changed. The author uses these lines of code in his daily documents, but since it involves non-free fonts and/or uses complex Lua patches, the code below cannot be integrated into the published version.

If you are willing to use LuaLaTeX, then the following aspects may help you further improve the current font configuration.

• If you have the font Palatino Linotype installed, then replacing the default TeXGyrePagellaX using the following code gives you slightly better result:

  \directlua
    {
      fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature
        {
          name = "palatino-linotype-fix",
          type = "kern",
          data =
            {
              ["r"] = { ["ê"] = 120 },
              ["v"] = { ["ê"] = 180 },
              ["w"] = { ["ê"] = 180 },
              ["y"] = { ["ê"] = 180 },
            },
        }
    }
  \setmainfont{Palatino Linotype}
    [
      Numbers = OldStyle ,
      RawFeature = +palatino-linotype-fix
    ]
  

• If you have the font Palatino Sans LT Pro installed, then replacing the default mathsf font with this gives more pleasant visual effect:

\setmathsf{Palatino Sans LT Pro}
\setmathfont{PalatinoSansLTPro-LightIta}[range=sfit]

• The default configuration for math fonts has some imperfections. The following code helps to improve it. But for this you need to modify the .cls file itself and then maintain your local version of it. Here is how:
  • First, add this definition at the beginning of the font configuration.

  \ExplSyntaxOff
  % https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/505003
  \def\mathkern@fix@for@lua
    {
      \directlua
        {
          local mathkerns = {
            ["Asana-Math"] = {
              [0x1D447] = {% T
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=-120},
                },
              },
              [0x1D449] = {% V
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=-120},
                },
              },
              [0x1D44A] = {% W
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=-30},
                },
              },
              [0x1D453] = {% f
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=-135},
                },
              },
              [0x1D44F] = {% b
                topright = {
                  {height=0,kern=75},
                },
              },
            },
            ["KpMath-Regular"] = {
              [0x1D6FD] = {% \beta
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=30},
                },
              },
              [0x1D6FF] = {% \delta
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=30},
                },
              },
              [0x1D702] = {% \eta
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=30},
                },
              },
              [0x1D703] = {% \theta
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=10},
                },
              },
              [0x1D714] = {% \omega
                bottomright = {
                  {height=0,kern=30},
                },
              },
            },
          }
          local function initmathkern(tfmdata)
            local values = mathkerns[tfmdata.properties.psname]
            if not values then return end
            for cp, value in next, values do
              local tcp = type(cp)
              if tcp == 'string' then
                cp = tfmdata.resources.unicodes[cp]
              end
              local char = tfmdata.characters[cp]
              if char then
                local mathkern = char.mathkerns
                if not mathkern then
                  mathkern = {}
                  char.mathkerns = mathkern
                end
                for corner, v in next, value do
                  mathkern[corner] = v
                end
              end
            end
          end
          fonts.constructors.newfeatures'otf'.register{
            name = 'mathkern',
            description = 'Overwrite mathkern values',
            initializers = {
              base = initmathkern,
            },
          }
        }
    }
  \ExplSyntaxOn
  

  • Then, just before \RequirePackage { unicode-math }, add these lines:

  \sys_if_engine_luatex:T
    {
      \mathkern@fix@for@lua
    }
  

  • Finally, replace \setmathfont { KpMath-Regular.otf } with \setmathfont [ RawFeature = mathkern ] { KpMath-Regular.otf }, and replace

  \setmathfont { texgyrepagella-math.otf }
    [
      range = { it / { Latin, latin }, bfit / { Latin, latin }, up / num, bfup / num }
    ]
  

  • with

  \setmathfont [ RawFeature = mathkern ] { Asana-Math.otf }
    [
      range = { it / { Latin, latin }, bfit / { Latin, latin }, up / num, bfup / num }
    ]
  

License

This work is released under the LaTeX Project Public License, v1.3c or later.