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I'm writing a bill for the US Congress and am looking for templates or packages or other aids to create the look seen in current legislation, examples are:

https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr513/BILLS-115hr513ih.pdf

https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/s131/BILLS-115s131is.pdf

I've already looked here:

https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/other

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/

http://www.latextemplates.com/

https://www.overleaf.com/gallery

If there are no preexisting aids, what structures would be best to start with, then tweak?

Mike
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    I'd start with article and work my way through the requirements. The margins are unusual, use the geometry package there. The linenumbers can be set with the linenopackage, it has an option \pagewiselinenumbersfor resetting numbers after each page. The rest should be pretty much straightforward. Redefining the section command should be not that difficult as well. – Uwe Ziegenhagen Mar 11 '17 at 19:19
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    welcome to tex.sx. if/when you are successful, please consider adding the result to the tex showcase, and submitting it to ctan. – barbara beeton Mar 11 '17 at 19:27
  • I'd add: titlesec for the various (sub-)sections (load as \usepackage[pagestyles]{titlesec} and you can also deal with the header and footer); enumitem for the lists; and \setspace for the line spacing. But, above all, be sure that you can submit a PDF. If they expect .docx or something, it's probably not worth the hassle (my guess is that line numbering won't convert well from TeX to Word). – jon Mar 11 '17 at 19:36
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    But... What gives you the impression that the look comes from TeX? And, would it not be the case that the PDF, and possibly the source documents (probably MS Word) must meet certain standards that are not obvious from merely looking at the PDF? I do not know about bills, but I do know that Supreme Court briefs are required to have a certain appearance (font, size, etc.) that TeX cannot do as well as an ordinary word processor. –  Mar 12 '17 at 01:21
  • I would think that Congress has people that do this for them – Scott Seidman Mar 26 '17 at 00:10

1 Answers1

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This is my 2nd attempt, which is a simplification of my 1st attempt which used a number of spacing-tweaks to yield all the same line breaks and page breaks as the official PDF. For the version posted here, I deleted 20-30 tweaks, then iterated the remaining to obtain a 'best fit'. There remain a few unsavory space tweaks that I'd like to get rid of but am not sure of the best way.

A couple notes:

The fonts are similar but not the same. If you know where the correct fonts are that are in a latex-ready format, please let me know.

In the body of the official PDF, the line spacing is 100% uniform. Trial and error lead to:

  • \section padding as 0.54\baselineskip
  • word spacing as \fontdimen2\font=1.8\wrdspc
  • line spacing as \setlength{\baselineskip}{4.7ex}

Take a look at the official bill on Congress.gov. Link is in the original post. In Section 2,3,6,7 the containing list is indented, with numeric indices. In Section 4,5 it starts without indention, with alphabet indicies. My solution was to create a list called enumeratetwo.

In the official PDF, many pages have 24 lines and many have 25. The reason is not obvious to me. There is a hard clearpageto begin Section 6, and probably one to begin Secion 4.

There were one or two other peculiarities that don't come to mind right now.

Comments welcome.

Alas, stack is saying i'm limited to 30,000 but had pasted in 7,000 too many.

Mike
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  • You are barking up the wrong tree. The PDF comes from a recent version of Acrobat Distiller on Windows. The creating program is unknown, but might be MS Word or some other office program. The typography suggests word processor, not TeX. If I were you, I would use a word processor and forget about TeX for this purpose. –  Mar 26 '17 at 00:12
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    I do not and cannot believe that the typographic conventions for US Congress bills are in fact so prescriptive as to specify that \baselineskip must be anything as precise as 4.7ex (which makes it dependent upon the font and fontsize). The fact that lists are both indented and not indented indicates to me that it is not a typographic mastermind in charge paying attention to all details, but that, for many aspects, there are no real rules and no one actually cares that much (presumably because they use Word and don't realize that they could make a consistently-formatted document) ... – jon Mar 26 '17 at 00:46
  • You could use the packages lipsum or blindtext to get sample text that won't fill up your 30k limit. To determine the font, see http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/45919/107497. But I agree with jon that there may not be any actual rules, and a simple rigid format will do fine. – Teepeemm Mar 26 '17 at 00:49
  • ... so why not blow them away by mimicking, but not foolishly treating all aspects as an example of a 'rule', the basics. A quick look at the documents makes it look like none of the main issues are terribly tricky to implement. The only problem with your question is that it is actually many questions rolled into one. Ask one question at a time. – jon Mar 26 '17 at 00:50