jwjournal, a personal LaTeX class for writing journals

Package dependencies: enumitem, einfart, minimalist, needspace, projlib, tcolorbox.

Introduction

A typical journal entry produced by jwjournal looks like this:

Codewise, it is as simple as below:

2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden

  Today I visited the botanical garden!

  [Food] And had *ice cream* for lunch!

  >>> This botanical garden has a history of nearly two hundred years, take a look at this photo:
      || <0.40> {example-image}

  (( <0.45> {example-image-a}
  <- <5>
  )) <0.50> {example-image-b}
  <- <5>
  (( <0.45> {example-image-c}

It is also possible to write the date with other separators, such as 2023/01/01 or 2023.01.01.

With the options month-day-year or day-month-year, you can also write date in the format mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy, respectively. You may refer to the English, French and German demo documents for examples.

Every day of the week has its unique color, like this:

By the way, the conversion from plain date string like 2023-01-01 to natural language like January 1, 2023 ⬦ Sunday is done by jwjournal automatically and has multilingual support. Thus, for example (via \UseLanguage):

• Chinese:
• French:
• German:
• Japanese:
• Spanish:
• ... and more...

Usage

The structure of the document is very simple:

\documentclass[11pt, paperstyle = light yellow, color entry, use indent = false]{jwjournal}
\UseLanguage{⟨language⟩} % For English this line can be omitted.
\begin{document}



% Your journal



\end{document}

The available class options include:

• month-day-year or day-month-year for using other date format;
• paperstyle = ... adjusts the paper color, choices include: light yellow, yellow, parchment, green, light gray, gray, nord, dark...
• color entry adds more color to the title of each entry;
• scroll turns the scroll mode on, which generates a single-page pdf similar to a long screenshot.

There are also some relevant options provided by the base class of jwjournal:

• use indent = false: disable the paragraph indentation and add some space between each paragraph instead.
• use style = ⟨provided style⟩: select the designing style of the current article; for our purpose here, it is recommended to use the style classical (with this the option use indent = false is added by default), together with the options title in boldface and title in sffamily, see the comment below regarding the usage of "Section".

You may refer to the demo documents to see their actual usage.

Here are the major syntaxes for your main text:

1. Title

   • Any line begins with date like 2023-01-01 or 2023/01/01 would be regard as the Title line.
   • You may write the weather and/or location after the date.
   • Example:

     2023-01-01 Sunny | Apartment
     

   With the options month-day-year or day-month-year, you can also write date in the format mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy, respectively. You may refer to the English, French and German demo documents for examples.

2. Note

   • Any line begins with something like [Note] would be regard as the Note line.
   • Example:

     [Note] In hindsight, it was the right decision.
     

     The space(s) between [Note] and the text following it would be ignored.

   You may also use 【 and 】, which is especially useful when writing Chinese.

3. Emphasis

   • You may emphasize text as with Markdown:
     • *⟨text⟩* is emphasizing;
     • **⟨text⟩** is bolding;
     • ***⟨text⟩*** is bolding and emphasizing.
   • You may put text in a colored block via >>>, its usage is like the > in Markdown for blockquote.

4. Image

   • Displayed images can be included via one of the following ways:
     • || <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩} or || {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>: show image in the middle.
     • (( <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩} or (( {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>: show image on the left.
     • )) <⟨width⟩> {⟨image file name⟩} or )) {⟨image file name⟩} <⟨width⟩>: show image on the right.

   The <⟨width⟩> is optional. Here ⟨width⟩ is a number like 0.75, the unit is \linewidth. When <⟨width⟩> is not given, the width would be full \linewidth.

5. Code

   Due to the current method of implementation, it is unfortunate that one cannot directly insert source code in the document. There are some workarounds though, as described below.

   • For inline code: you may simply write it between two backticks `⟨code⟩`, similar to the Markdown syntax. However, be aware that special characters need to be escaped, for example, \ should be written as \textbackslash, { should be written as \{, % should be written as \%, etc.
   • For displayed code: this feature is not yet complete.

6. Section

   • You may start a new (unnumbered)
     • section, via ## {⟨section title⟩};
     • subsection, via ### {⟨subsection title⟩};
     • subsubsection, via #### {⟨subsubsection title⟩}.
   • If you wish to use the numbered version, write ##+, ###+ and ####+ instead.

   It is recommanded to use the class option title in boldface, title in sffamily and use style = classical (these options are provided by the base class of jwjournal). If you also wish your section title to be in small caps shape, then you may put the ⟨section title⟩ in \textsc.

7. Subfile

   • With this feature you may organize your journals in a systematic way by putting the fragments of it into subfiles distributed in separate folders. For example, you may have each folder's name to be the year, and within a folder you may have .tex files named after each month.
   • You may include a subfile containing journal text in one of the following ways:
     • :: {⟨file name⟩} for input, similarly as \input.
     • ::: {⟨file name⟩} for include, similarly as \include.

   Explicitly, these are \InputJournal and \IncludeJournal. If in the preamble you wish to define some automatic processing involving input or inclusion of subfiles, please use these two commands.

With a few more for icing on the cake:

• |: The first vertical bar would be interpreted as \hfill. This allows you to write the title line as

  2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
  

  and then the address Botanical Garden would be printed at the end of the title line.
• \\ and //: \\ has its usual meaning in LaTeX for starting a new line, while // has been defined to be starting a new line with some vertical spacing. This allows you to write the annotations as:

  [Note] Some text.
    //
    More text.
    //
    (Some remark)
    \\
    (Another remark)
    \\
    (Final remark)
  

  As a result, all the text would be properly indented.

  Note that images specified via ||, (( or )) already contain line breaks, thus you don't need to (actually, you can't) write // or \\ around them.

• >>: Text after >> would be centered. This is intended for writing annotations/captions for displayed images:

  || {image-name}
  >> (Some remark)
  >> (Another remark)
  

• ~~: If you use >> or >>> inside a Note block (i.e. lines start with [...]), then there would no way to get out of the centered or boxed area and then continue the indented text; in such cases, you may start a new paragraph that start with ~~, this will continue the indented text block:

  [Test] Here is some text.
    || {some-image} <.4>
    >> (Centered text)
  
  ~~
    Some more text.
    >>> Text in color box.
  
  ~~
    And more text.
  

• -> and <-: Skip or retrieve certain vertical space, by default half of \baselineskip. You may specify the exact spacing in the unit of \baselineskip: for example, -> <0.3> would be skipping 0.3\baselineskip, while <- <.75> means retrieving 0.75\baselineskip.
• ---: Three or more hyphen chars - in a separate paragraph would be interpreted as a separation line (as with Markdown).
• +++: If a single sentence or a few words fall to the next page, you may write a +++ before that entry to enlarge the current page by one line.

  You may write this +++ several times if necessary, but do make sure that the number of the + sign is a multiple of 3.

• ===: Three or more equal signs = would simply be ignored. This is for improving the readability of the code, allowing you to write your journal like:

  2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
  ===================================
  
  Today I visited the botanical garden!
  
  [Food] And had ice-cream for lunch!
  

You may also refer to the demo documents to see their behaviors in action.

And don't forget that you are still using LaTeX! Thus if the provided syntax does not satisfy you, there are always LaTeX commands as a fallback.

Indentations are not important, but paragraphs need to be separated by a blank line. For the sake of readability, it is recommended to organize your text as one of the following ways:

• with indentation:

  2023-01-01
  Sunny | Botanical Garden
  
    ......
    ......
  

• with a separation line:

  2023-01-01 Sunny | Botanical Garden
  ===================================
  
  ......
  ......
  

• or maybe even:

  ==========
  2023-01-01    Sunny | Botanical Garden
  ==========
  
  ......
  ......
  

TeXnical details

Engines and base classes

• With pdfLaTeX, the base class is minimart.
• With XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, the base class is einfart.

Regarding the fonts

If you are using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to compile your document, then 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 total download size would be smaller, and the installation would be easier.

These are necessary if you wish to write your document in Chinese (either simplified or traditional) or Japanese. Also, without these fonts installed, the compilation speed might be much slower — the compilation would still pass, but the system shall spend (quite) some time verifying that the fonts are indeed missing before switching to the fallback fonts.

Colors

The colors from Monday to Sunday have the internal names jwjournal-color-1, ..., jwjournal-color-7. Currently they are defined as:

\colorlet { jwjournal-color-1 } { yellow!50!green  }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-2 } { yellow!70!orange }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-3 } { cyan!70!blue     }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-4 } { violet           }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-5 } { yellow!40!cyan   }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-6 } { yellow!20!orange }
\colorlet { jwjournal-color-7 } { red!20!orange    }

Functionality

The main features are achieved with the power of LaTeX3's regex functionality. It scans the content paragraph by paragraph and converts recognized patterns into corresponding TeX commands. Thus, 2023-01-01 Weather becomes \JWJournalEntry{2023-01-01}{Weather}, [Note] ... becomes \item[Note] ... inside a description environment, and +++ is essentially \enlargethispage{\baselineskip}, etc. However, this comes with a price: in order to scan the content, it is firstly stored in a macro \g_jwjournal_content_tl, and that means that you cannot use commands like \verb in your main text (unless explicitly \end{jwjournal}, write your code, and then \begin{jwjournal}). Also, synctex won't work properly.

Dates

The conversion of date string to natural language, and the calculation of the day of the week are accomplished by projlib-date, part of the ProjLib toolkit, which is still at its early stage, in some aspects not as functional as existing package such as datenumber, but should evolve through time.

Language and date format

Language and date format can both be set in two ways: as class option or with corresponding commands.

• The user-level command for setting language is \UseLanguage, provided by projlib-language; the one for setting date format is \SetDatetimeInputFormat, provided by projlib-date.
• When you set the language, it is not exactly the same using class option or using command: when you select a language via class option, only the setting for this language would be loaded; however, with \UseLanguage, it would load all the language settings and then switch to your selected one. Sometimes the page breaking behavior differs slightly. Personally I prefer the \UseLanguage approach, for this would allow you to switch language in the middle of your document.

Scroll mode

The scroll mode is achieved by directly accessing \pdfpageheight (pdfTeX and XeTeX) or \pageheight (LuaTeX). The minimal page height is set to be 10in. It is worth noting that in order to calculate the height needed, the entire content are put into a single box, which puts a limitation on the length of your document (but this usually wouldn't be a problem).

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank his friend Junzhuo Zhao for his valuable help with the German language. Danke schön!

License

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