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I'm starting to write a bigger assignment (Danish, college-level: 25pages).

My requirements:

  1. Internationalisation: it is in Danish
  2. The manuscript will need citations, references and a bibliography.

As it's a bigger paper and not just a simple assignment, I thought I'd use memoir as the documentclass.
I've heard good stuff of biblatex and would like to use it. I guess I could use this script to help me with biber.
Xe(La)TeX sounds great with it's support of unicode, but honestly I'm not sure if I should be using it or just sticking with TeXShops Western-encoding or if perhaps LuaTeX would be better.
I'd have to use either polyglossia or babel to get Danish support in the bibliography, but I guess I need csquotes too so I can control the quotations-style. (Or if I'm not wrong, it's already included in memoir?)

Then again, maybe I can keep things simple and go with memoir and the simple stuff like BibTeX?

For this kind of problem, as a beginner, how do I choose which Tex engine and Latex classes to use?

Community
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johankj
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    Your question might be too wide to get a good answer. Since you speak Danish you might take a look at the manual by Lars Madsen (you will find a link here), he has some suggestions on "larger" projects (and is the maintainer of the memoir class). In general I think that it is better to have a simpler preamble that you understand, than larger that you have copy-pasted from somewhere. – Jesper Ipsen Dec 10 '12 at 13:44
  • I voted to close because your question is overly broad IMO. Please search this site for the most upvoted questions about [tag:xetex] (which isn't essential for Danish texts) as well as [tag:biblatex] and [tag:csquotes] (which I both recommend). To answer your question about the latter: No, csquotes is not included in memoir. – lockstep Dec 10 '12 at 13:57
  • @Ipsen IMO stands for "In my opinion". – lockstep Dec 10 '12 at 14:08
  • I've edited this so it is more focussed and asks for something of more general use - otherwise I think it would be closed and we don't have a "how do I choose" qn along these lines already. – Charles Stewart Dec 10 '12 at 14:30
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    For Danish standard LaTeX is perfectly adequate. \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} will enable you to input Danish characters via unicode. Using biblatex will enable you to use these characters in the bibliography file. See http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/13509/15925 for an introduction. – Andrew Swann Dec 10 '12 at 14:34

1 Answers1

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If the question is taken to be 'how can I set up memoir with biber+biblatex for a basic Danish document using an unicode-aware engine?' (I suspect some will vote to close this), then the answer can be pretty straightforward. (If it prompts further, new questions, that might not be a bad thing either.)

Anyway, here is one example that uses luatex:

\documentclass[article, % similar to article class: no \chapter
12pt]{memoir}

\usepackage{lipsum}% for filler text

% LuaTex / fonts
\pdfprotrudechars=2 % optional
\pdfadjustspacing=2 % optional
\usepackage{fontspec}%
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}%
\newfontfeature{Microtype}{protrusion=default;expansion=default;}% optional
\setmainfont[Microtype, Numbers=OldStyle]{Linux Libertine}%
\setsansfont[Microtype, Scale=MatchLowercase, Numbers=OldStyle]{Linux Biolinum}%
\setmonofont[Microtype, Scale=MatchLowercase]{Inconsolata}%

% babel / csquotes / biblatex
\usepackage[danish]{babel}
\usepackage[strict=true, autostyle=once, 
  danish=quotes,
  % danish=guillemets,
  ]{csquotes}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric]{biblatex}% see documentation for options
\addbibresource{mybiblio.bib}% your bibliography file

% headers and footers (from memoir)
\makepagestyle{basic}%
% cmd:       {<name>}{<left>}{<centre>}{<right>}
\makeevenhead{basic}{\thepage}{}{}%
\makeoddhead{basic}{}{}{\thepage}%
\makeevenfoot{basic}{}{}{}%
\makeoddfoot{basic}{}{}{}%
\pagestyle{basic} % call main headers into effect

\begin{document}

\lipsum\lipsum

\end{document}

As you write, you'll probably find you'll want to change or add things to your document (e.g., style of \section-related commands), but this should be enough to get started.

jon
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