`jwjournal`, a personal LaTeX class for writing journals

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!

It is also possible to write the date as 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 and French 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 automatically by jwjournal 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]{jwjournal}
\begin{document}

% Your journal

\end{document}

The options are:

month-day-year or day-month-year for other date format
paperstyle = ... adjusts the paper color, options include: lightyellow、yellow、parchment、green、lightgray、gray、nord、dark...
color entry adds more color to the title of each entry
scroll turns on the scroll mode and can generate a single-page pdf similar to a long screenshot

And there are only two major syntaxes for the main text:

Title
- Any line begins with date like 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
```
Note
- Any line begins with something like [Note] would be regard as the Note line.
- Example:
```
[Note] In hindsight, it was the right decision.
```

With a few more for icing on the cake:

+++: 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.

===: 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.

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

  ......
  ......
```

with a separation line:

2023-01-01 Sunny
================

......
......

or maybe even:

==========
2023-01-01    Sunny
==========

......
......

TeXnical details

Engines and base classes

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

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}).

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).

License

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

latexstudio/jwjournal

jwjournal, a personal LaTeX class for writing journals