Class file for "Feynman Lectures on Physics"

Question

I have a pile of handouts and lecture notes from a course that I've been teaching every fall for a number of years, and I'm thinking of putting them together in a textbook format (I know that some people advise against writing textbooks; let's just say that I want to do this because I'll keep on teaching this course for the foreseeable future and writing a textbook now will save me time and effort in the long run). I've always thought that the Feynman Lectures on Physics has a really nice layout for a textbook, and I'd really like to reproduce it. I could spend sometime writing a class file that mimics this layout, but before I do that, I wanted to check if someone has done that already. A search on CTAN fails to return anything relevant, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Answer 1

Maybe the sidenotes-package is a solution for you (I suspect you want to put figures and notes in the margin), it gives you a lot of the features of the tufte-latex-class, like margin figures, but it can be combined with any other documentclass. Here is an example using the standard book-class with a large outer margin:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage[outer=7cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{sidenotes}

\begin{document}
\chapter{Test}
\section{This}
\blindtext[1]

\begin{marginfigure}
  \includegraphics[width=\marginparwidth]{helix.pdf}
  \caption{Helix}
\end{marginfigure}
\blindtext[1]

\section{That}
\blindtext[3]
\end{document}