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The title says it all. I think that a beautiful speech deserves to be written in a beautiful template. I can just simply take a basic article or something alike and type the speech, but as a LaTeX geek, I would like the speech to look wonderful. Possibilities for margin notes would be appreciated, they might give some clues to improvise in the middle of the speech.

Felipe Aguirre
  • 1,699

1 Answers1

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You want your speech to look "wonderful", and "wonderfulness" is subjective. In my case, wonderfulness and sobriety are almost synonymous; below I present a possibility.

You can take the article document class and do some little customizations. In the following example I chose the article document class and use the following settings and packages:

  • Font size 11pt (or perhaps 12pt) to facilitate reading.

  • The geometry package for the page layout: a5paper, narrow right margin, generous left margin for marginal notes.

  • The marginnote package to typeset marginal notes: using \marginnote, marginal notes are not floats. \reversemarginpar to guarantee marginal notes on the left margin.

  • The parskip package: I think that for a speech is convenient to have some vertical spacing between paragraphs and with no indentation for their first lines.

  • The fwlw (first word, last word) package and its NextWordFoot page style: having the possibility to read ahead to the word on the next page can be helpful.

  • The micro-typographic features provided by the microtype package.

  • A nice font: I choose librebaskerville.

The code:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[a5paper,lmargin=3.5cm,rmargin=25pt,bmargin=0.8cm,includefoot]{geometry}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage{fwlw}
\usepackage{librebaskerville}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just to generate text for the example

\pagestyle{NextWordFoot}
\reversemarginpar
\renewcommand*\marginfont{\footnotesize}

\begin{document}
Some text\marginnote{Some initial remark here}
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum*[4]\marginnote{Remember to mention something at this point}
\lipsum*[2]\marginnote{Don't forget to mention some people here}\lipsum[5]
\lipsum[4]
\end{document}

enter image description here

Gonzalo Medina
  • 505,128
  • This is a wonderful example. I would just like to add that including a title with \maketitle, will somehow interfere with NextWordFoot, which does not appear at all on the first page. The remaining pages are fine. – Antti Feb 27 '19 at 12:40