Making an 8-page 7″x4.25″ captioned photo book with Org Mode and LaTeX

| emacs, org, publishing

Here's another technique that makes a simple photo book. I wanted to
make an 8-page book that could be printed 4 pages to a 8.5″x14″ sheet
(duplex, flip along the short edge), with a final page size of
7″x4.25″.

Sample with my own photos:

out.jpg

Prerequisites

  • ImageMagick
  • Texlive (probably)
  • latex-beamer
  • Org Mode and Emacs

Process

We can define the labels and their captions in a named table like this:

Let's Go for a Walk  
   
Caption for photo 1 placeholder.png
Caption for photo 2 placeholder.png
Caption for photo 3 placeholder.png
Caption for photo 4 placeholder.png
Caption for photo 5 placeholder.png
   

Note that the first page is row #1 this time, instead of starting with
the last page.

Then we generate the LaTeX code with some Emacs Lisp, like so: 

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :var pages=story :results value latex :exports results
(mapconcat (lambda (row) (format "\\graphicframe{%s}{%s}" (cadr row) (org-export-string-as (car row) 'latex t))) pages "\n")
#+end_src

I put that in a subtree for easier exporting with C-c C-e C-s l b (org-export-dispatch, subtree, LaTeX, Beamer).

Story

Process

  • Set up Org Mode export to Beamer 
    (eval-after-load "ox-latex"
  ;; update the list of LaTeX classes and associated header (encoding, etc.)
  ;; and structure
  '(add-to-list 'org-latex-classes
                `("beamer"
                  ,(concat "\\documentclass[presentation]{beamer}\n"
                           "[DEFAULT-PACKAGES]"
                           "[PACKAGES]"
                           "[EXTRA]\n")
                  ("\\section{%s}" . "\\section*{%s}")
                  ("\\subsection{%s}" . "\\subsection*{%s}")
                  ("\\subsubsection{%s}" . "\\subsubsection*{%s}"))))
  • Set up the header.tex

    This file gets included in the LaTeX file for the children's book.
    Tweak it to change the appearance. In this example, I use black serif
    text text on the left side of a picture, both occupying roughly half
    of the page. I also experimented with using a different font this time, which you might need to install (for me, I did apt-get install texlive-fonts-extra). 

    \geometry{paperwidth=7in,paperheight=4.25in,left=0.5in,right=0.5in}
\beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{Alegreya}
\usefonttheme{serif}
\setbeamercolor{normal text}{fg=black,bg=white}
\setbeamercolor{structure}{fg=black,bg=white}
%% \setbeamertemplate{frametitle}
%% {
%%   \begin{center}
%%   \noindent
%%   \insertframetitle
%%   \end{center}
%% }
\newcommand{\graphicframe}[2] {
   {
   %% \if #1\empty 
   %% \usebackgroundtemplate{}
   %% \fi
   \ifstrempty{#1}{
   \begin{frame}[plain]
     \begin{center}
     \noindent
     \textbf{\huge{#2}}
     \end{center}
   \end{frame}
   }{
   \begin{frame}[plain]
      \begin{columns}
      \begin{column}{0.48\textwidth}
      \huge{#2}
      \end{column}
      \begin{column}{0.48\textwidth}
      \includegraphics[height=\textheight,width=\textwidth,keepaspectratio=true]{#1}
      \end{column}
      \end{columns}
   \end{frame}
   }
   }
}
\usepackage[noframe]{showframe}
\renewcommand{\maketitle}{}
  • Create the PDF 
    pdflatex index.tex
  • Create one PNG per page 
    mkdir pages
convert -density 300 index.pdf -quality 100 pages/page%d.png
  • Create the 4-up imposition

    The diagram at https://pressnostress.com/iw/howto/booklets/1.html was helpful. 

    montage \( page4.png -rotate 180 \) \( page3.png -rotate 180 \) page7.png page0.png -tile 2x2 -mode Concatenate front.png
montage \( page2.png -rotate 180 \) \( page5.png -rotate 180 \) page1.png page6.png -tile 2x2 -mode Concatenate back.png
convert front.png back.png -density 300 ../print.pdf

Other notes

Placeholder image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_placeholder.png – public domain.

You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.