octavo – Typeset books following classical design and layout

The oc­tavo class is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the stan­dard LaTeX book class. Its pur­pose is to type­set books fol­low­ing clas­si­cal de­sign and lay­out prin­ci­ples, with the ex­press in­ten­tion of en­cour­ag­ing the mak­ing of beau­ti­ful books by any­one with ac­cess to a good printer and with an in­cli­na­tion to­wards ven­er­a­ble crafts, e.g., book­bind­ing.
The oc­tavo class dif­fers from the book class by im­ple­ment­ing many of the pro­pos­als and in­sights of re­spected ex­perts, es­pe­cially Jan Tschi­chold and Hugh Wil­liamson.
The doc­u­men­ta­tion dis­cusses meth­ods to or­gan­ise and print out any text into sig­na­tures, which can then be gath­ered, folded and sewn into a book.