Mrthfx

Every week I produce a couple of A5 booklets (A4 folded) for my wife, an active colleague in church ministry, from which I am recently retired. I call the booklets a pulpit manuscript, as it includes the basic script of everything that is said or sung in the course of the service. Each part of the service is given a section, such as section{Prayer}, section{Reading}, etc. Each goes into the tableofcontents, so that inside the cover, I have the service running order at a glance. I have used various TeX approaches such as memoir, koma-script, ConTeXt, etc., and every editor available. I am settled on Auctex, using Spacemacs.

Although I have been using LaTeX for years, recently, I ventured into splitting my preamble into .cls and .sty files, which has all worked out fine for me. This inspired me to consider whether there might be some way in which I could save myself the tedium of writing this sort of thing every time I want to include a hymn in the order of service:

section{textbf{Hymn 360} hfill textit{normalsize Praise, my soul}}

This results in Hymn 360 Praise, my soul, which is pretty much what I want.

I tried the xparse package, which allows me to use

NewDocumentCommand{hymn}{mm}{textbf{#1}{hfill}textit{#2}} 

in the preamble, and then hymn{}{} in the document. It looks pleasing enough, but, unfortunately, it does not go into the toc. (I know that I can use addcontentsline, but that would be to make the shortcut longer than the route. I am trying to make life easier, not more complex.)

I have also tried lethymnsection and renewcommand{hymn}{section}, which does put the hymn into the toc, but I do not know how to format the section in the text in a way that matches exactly what I have from xparse above. I am told that it is not a good idea to use an alias for section but, in my use case, I do not foresee that as a problem.

I am wondering is someone could show me how to get a nicely formatted section header from hymn{Hymn 360}{Praise, my soul}. I like what xparse produces but I am not able to get it into the toc. When I make hymn an alias for section, I do not know how to format the section behind the scenes so that it produces Hymn 360 Praise, my soul. Basically, I want to achieve that in such a way that for each new document, I do not need to make a lot of manual formatting.

I have tried to be painstakingly clear as to what I have tried, and what I want, but am happy to elaborate if required. In reality, I could get by as I do now with the section{textbf{Hymn 360} hfill textit{normalsize Praise, my soul}} but I like to dream that there is a better way.

In the production of a booklet for my wife, who conducts church services more than once a week, I use a section heading to mark each component of the service. For most components, this is straightforward enough. For instance: section{Prayer}.

However, I like to add some formatting to the section for a hymn so that it looks like: Hymn 646 The day thou gavest. As it is an A5 booklet, I like to make the text of the first line of the hymn fit, and then I use normalsize to make the line take up less space.

Although it is hardly an inconvenience to format the hymn line in this way, I wondered if I could do this automatically, so that all I would need to do was put {} round the hymn number and also the first line, so that in the text I would write hymn{Hymn 646}{The day thou gavest}, and LaTeX would look after the formatting. The other requirement was that the hymn should be listed in the tableofcontents.

I discovered that the following code in the preamble would do what I wanted as far as formatting the hymn heading was concerned. However, it did not appear in the toc.

usepackage{xparse}

NewDocumentCommand{hymn}{mm}{textbf{#1}{hfill}textit{#2}}

It was put to me that I should "include the section wrapper in the definition of hymn". As I use the documentclass scrbook by Koma-script, and did not want a numbered section, I used addsec rather than section. That resulting code was as shown below:

RequirePackage{xparse}

NewDocumentCommand{hymn}{mm}{addsec{textbf{#1}{hfill}textit{#2}}}

This worked in so far as it put the hymn into the toc. However, I lost the nice formatting of the addsec heading in the text. The italics were gone! A little research revealed that I needed a font that had an italics version, such as kpfonts. I made that my font for the document, and, finally, I had achieved my goal.

Thanks to those who commented by suggesting steps I felt unable to take. After some thought, I realised what they were saying. Should colleagues using LaTeX for service booklets find this answer of interest, I should be happy to hear from them.